Long Time, No See (or Write)

Okay, from February to June (barely) is a long break in blogging and for that I apologize. In my own defense, I have to tell you we moved from Houston to Los Angeles. And since this wasn't a company move, it was all on us and we had many years of accumulated stuff to go through and organize and get rid of. What a job! We moved into a place that's one-fourth the size of our house in Houston so the getting rid of part of the job was most important.  I just wonder why we waited so long to do this. I love being here. I love being near by one daughter and grandgirl. And the other daughter is at least in the same state!  We've become great friend with the 2 yo Ruby. What a gem she is, too. We babysit every Tuesday because her mom teaches yoga then (hence, our very own Ruby Tuesday). And last weekend we babysat while her parents took a well-deserved mini-vacation. It was our first sleepover with Ruby and did we ever love it! She's an amazing child -- bright, funny, quirky, silly, cute as the dickens and has a mind of her own (don't all 2 year olds?).

I love this photo of Ruby with yogurt all over her face and a picture of her mom at the same age in the background. They're both cute little girls!



As for the beading world: At the end of February, Mandy came to visit!!!  It was the best. We met through her blog, Beads for Brains, and became online friends, really good friends. It was a little unnerving for us both to have this meet up. What if we didn't like each other in person? Well, that was SO not a problem. We had fun, took a beading class, made bracelets, started a Nancy Dale type Color Play piece.  The only problem with the visit was that it was too short! An added bonus was that Mandy & my hubby got a long like old friends, too. Lovely!

After that came all the move preparations and then the sale of most of our belongings (that's a photo of some of the yarn I had for sale and ultimately donated -- I still have too much here!) and the packing of everything else. I still brought too much crafting stuff and we have a second bedroom filled with boxes of mostly my junk (and I call my husband the packrat!).  I haven't gotten to the beads yet and we moved in at the beginning of May!  But they're out of their boxes and onto some bookshelves. That's a start. Sadly the bookshelves are unreachable because of boxes and stuff in front of them! Some day...

I've signed up for Lori Anderson's Bead Soup Blog Party to force myself back into blogging and beading. My partner is Sheryl Stephens at The Babbling Beader. She has WAY more experience than I in beading but she and I have found connections that are really kind of amazing. We've even made some bracelets that are very much alike! How cool is that? Lori must have been pulled by some strange strings in the Universe to pair us up! I love that and am looking forward to our partnership.