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Phil Collins In Concert

My company, Event 360, in addition to producing the Breast Cancer 3-Day Walks for Komen also has Phil Collins as one of our clients.

Phil is on his final tour and I got the opportunity to go last night to it while he was in San Jose. We got really great seats and a quick walk backstage. We didn’t get to go anywhere cool backstage though. We did see Phil down the hallway, he’s very short…

It was a pretty good concert, very full stadium. He has a lot of devoted fans.

I was able to take a few pictures with my cell phone, but I don’t have flash or zoom, so this is the best I could do.

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Quilt Pictures

I took some pictures of my quilts today since I talked about doing it last night.

Here’s the rail fence quilt. Matt picked out the border fabric and from that fabric we picked out the three main fabrics. It was hard to imagine the final quilt when you just saw the fabrics but it turned out great! Suzanne did a huge majority of the actual quilting, with a meandering pattern. Mom and I both tried our hands at machine quilting. It is quite a skill to use that machine, I quilted myself into a corner, so there is a sharp angle where I did it. A cool variegated thread was used to do the quilting.

Next is the current state of my sunflower and heart quilt. This photo was taken prior to ironing on the last hearts to the square. The arrangement is far from final as well.

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My Second Quilt—In Progress

Thanks to my mom and sister, Suzanne, I learned how to quilt in a weekend. July 4th weekend specifically. And thanks to their hardwork and help the three of us created a rail fence quilt. I will be sure and take a picture and post it, it’s a very colorful quilt.

Suzanne is a professional quilter. In fact she just recently got a new long arm quilting machine. You can check out her site by clicking on the logo or here.

That same weekend mom gave me a little quilting pattern book, which is very different from miniature quilts. Miniature quilts are tiny detailed quilts that require a lot of experience and accuracy. Little quilts are, well just little. Insipired by my red purse with sunflower key chain I decided on a heart patterned quilt with each heart a different sunflower fabric for each heart and a red border.

Well, I started with the idea of doing 6 squares, then expanded to 20 and after having bought my final fabrics I am up to 24 squares. The hearts are all cut out, I just need to sew them to their square. My next step will be sewing each of the squares together, which I think is going to be the hardest part. I have been laying out the squares as I go and can tell that deciding on the final arrangement could take forever. After that I will head to a store and pick out a border!

More updates and hopefully some pictures as this progresses!

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Thyroid Update Part Deux

I went to my doctor on Friday to go over my thyroid results and the prognosis is good. My Free T4 is a normal level and while my TSH levels are undetectable still that could be because my body hasn’t adjusted yet to the normal levels of T4 so it hasn’t started making TSH again or my normal T4 could still be a little on the high side. Either way I have been deemed healthy enough to make babies!!! All I have to do is go in for another check up in 2 months.

Check back, hopefully sooner rather than later, for an update on the baby front!

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First Days of School

Our twin nephews Will & Joe had their first day of school this past week. Their first day EVER—they’re in kindergarten! They’re smart kids so I wasn’t surprised to hear that a lot of what they were asked to do their first day was already old hat (learning to count to 10? c’mon!) for them. But it was fun to hear about their first day and I was glad to hear it sounds like they like their teachers so far.

Anyway, it did make me wonder about MY first day of school. And Deb’s. Moms & dads? Do you guys happen to remember what it was like for us? I can’t for the life of me remember what my first day of kindergarten was like. In fact, I only have two random memories of all of kindergarten:

• getting my hand slapped by Mrs. Dickinson for “playing” with the paper cutter
• going to Mrs. Dickinson’s house to fish in her pond with Grandpa Brown

The biggest question I have now looking back on that is simple: what in the world was a paper cutter doing in a kindergarten classroom? I can’t imagine you’d still find that anywhere.

But I digress (…from what? I wonder…).

I do remember one “first day of school” ritual that happened at least a couple of years for me. I would wake up early because I was nervous/excited and couldn’t sleep. I would go microwave a couple of ears of sweet corn (since we tended to have left-over corn in the fridge that time of year) and eat it outside. I remember that and the annual Trapper Keeper shopping trip. I guess the laptop computer is the new Trapper Keeper? Weird what we remember.

What do you all remember about your first days of school over the years?

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Email Notification

There is now a new feature on ellsworthlink.net—you can sign yourself up to receive email notifications of when there is an update to the site. This will allow you to know when Deb or I have posted something so you don’t have to come to the site all the time to see if you missed something (we know you wait by your computers…).

You should be able to see the sign-up screen on the right-hand side of the screen. Give it a try. You can always un-subscribe if we go crazy and update the blog 8 times a day and you get sick of it.

Hope this helps us keep everyone up-to-speed on everything since we’re thinking of this as something of an open diary in terms of writing down what’s going on with us. Enjoy it! We’re having fun trying to make all the different functionality work and posting various non-sense.

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I Got the Good Genes!

Since we’re giving health updates, I should let everyone know that I passed my physical with flying colors. In fact, my cholesterol was much much much lower than it had any business being given my eating habits. I actually commented to the doctor “I guess I got the good genes” and he said that was a big part of it. So: thank you mom and dad.
Cholesterol: 178
LDL: 105
HDL: 49

Which, according to the American Heart Association, is pretty good…

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Thyroid Update

I got blood taken yesterday for my thyroid check up on Friday and the results accidentally were faxed to me.

I am officially almost normal!

My Free T4 is 1.54 and normal is between .71 and 1.85
My TSH is <.06 and normal is between .49 and 4.67

I recall my doctor saying that the TSH levels take longer to get to normal, so it’s expected that they would still be low.

More updates after Friday!

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