Freedom is the ability to fill your sewing room with as much crap as possible

Lots of news and fun stuff from the last week or so. I'll try to include a little bit of everything. I should break in the new blog layout with a nice long entry, after all.

Last Saturday, we went down to Lake Jackson, an area of Texas near Galveston, for a Ron Paul rally. Tanya came with us and we got to hear Ron speak, which was unbelievably awesome. There were tons of people there supporting him. He had a lot of very insightful and inspiring things to say, and I managed to capture the whole speech on video with my nifty camera. I'll be transcribing the speech if anyone's interested. If you'd like to actually see the speech, I would suggest doing a search online for the Lake Jackson Congressional Rally, as the quality of my video isn't very good. Lots of shoulders and picture-jiggling.



After the rally, we drove down to the beach, which was just 10 miles away, and I got to see the ocean for the first time since age 2. Completely amazing and very beautiful, even with the overcast sky. (And yes, the picture in my header is from that trip. That's me wading in the sand and collecting seashells.)



Tanya was quite freaked by the seagulls flipping out over the food we brought for them. They swarmed into a cloud of beaks and feathers that I have to agree was pretty intimidating.

So, rest of the week. Psych test was Thursday, and I did awesome! So I'm pretty happy about that. Grade came back from the Microbiology test, and that was a total A, and Sociology wasn't too bad either.



I got a whole giant box of fabric in the mail, courtesy of my dead grandmother. There's a lot of really awesome prints, and this photo doesn't nearly show all of the kick ass-ness of this fabric. When my mom got all of the fabric from the estate, she called to ask what types of prints I wanted, to which I replied "Just give me half of anything cotton. I guarantee I will use it at some point in my life." So she sent this giant box stuffed to the gills with tons of old fabric and, oddly enough, she included my violin from when I was in high school. My mother's weird.



I also finished the chameleon foundation block for a quilt I've been working on for some time. It's called Escaping Bugs and it's a Bottle Quilt Co. pattern. (I would link to their webpage, but the site was shut down after the passing of the owner.)

I've been saving up different bug fabrics for a very long time, and I had the majority of them stuffed into a basket with the pattern since before I moved to Texas. They sat in a box or the closet or just hidden somewhere for the last four years, and I was almost convinced I'd left them back in Reno. But I finally started on this quilt a few months ago. (I ended up having enough bug fabric for three quilts, so I sent some pre-cut blocks to my sister and aunt.) Now that my chameleon block is finished, I just have to finish the Sticky-Tongued Frog and then put the top together.

Last bit of news: I bought Dane a Nintendo Wii for Valentine's Day, officially making me the most amazing wife in the world.

And I close this post with a challenge! I want to see some artistic representations of this photo from my beach trip:



Use any medium, make it any size, add any elements, do whatever. I have plans for this picture, and I'd love to see what others can do with it!