One Bad Rug, One Pet Peeve, and A Thought

Hello again my wonderful Internet People!  Sorry I haven't written anything for all of you lately, my recovery is still going slowly and it has made concentration rather difficult for me, which in turn makes writing rather difficult.  That, and I have been playing at making those rag rugs I talked about in my last post.  I have one completely done (really badly), and I have a second one all braided and ready to be stitched.  Hopefully the second one will go together a little better than the first.  I am not kidding about the first one, it is really bad.

  Here, see:

Told ya!  And yes, I saw every one of those humps and valleys forming as I continued to stitch the braids together, I just didn't really care.  I needed to make the rug, and I needed to finish it, which I did.  I didn't care if it was any good or not, I just wanted to finish it (so I could start a new one!).  In all I did spend 6 days putting it together, but I didn't work on it all the time so maybe 30-35 hours total.  That's a lot of time to invest in crap, but I had fun and I wouldn't have been doing anything any more productive than making crap anyway, so I am going to call it time well spent. 

I did find a way to make it lay perfectly flat though, and I am using it right where I had planned on using it, and it is working just fine.  I don't think it will last for very long, but for now it works great.          

I think I am going to try stitching the braids together on the sewing machine for the second rug.  Hand stitching the first one was the most time consuming part (taking 4 of the 6 days), and I am pretty sure that is what is going to fail first when it starts disintegrating.  So, the sewing machine idea is rather appealing.  My machine does a very wide zig-zag stitch, and it has a wide space between the needle and the inside of the machine, so I am pretty sure I can at least sew the majority of it together on the machine.  And, maybe I can even get it flat this time.  

Other than making rugs I have pretty much not done a damn thing (other than play on Facebook) since last I typed.  We did actually leave the house for a few hours yesterday so I spent most of the rest of the day recovering from that.  And I have done some housework, and the usual, cost of living type stuff, but I am still trying desperately to conserve calories as much as humanly possible.  There are lots of things I probably should be doing, like pulling weeds out of the flower beds, but they are going to have to wait a little while longer.  I am still having a lot of trouble getting calories into me, and keeping any weight on me.  Fortunately no body has a house for sale on our block, so they can all deal with my messy yard for a while, or they can come clean it themselves if they don't want to wait for me.

That has always been a pet peeve of mine.  When people live in a neighborhood and complain about the one house where the grass isn't perfect or the garden is overgrown, it seems very few of them ever even consider the possibility that the people living there may have bigger struggles to attend to than cutting the freakin grass.  Did any of you ever go over there and ask them if they needed some help?  No?  Then do NOT assume they are just bad or lazy!  I know a lot of those houses are filled with people who just don't give a fuck, and helping them is as pointless as complaining about them, but a LOT of those houses may just be occupied by someone like me.  Someone who struggles each day just to make it from morning until night, someone who very much appreciates the need to keep her home neat and clean, but maybe just doesn't have the energy to do both.  Especially on someone else's schedule.  

No, I don't want my neighbors over here cleaning up my yard, most of my neighbors are not people I want anywhere near me or my family, but I sure don't want to hear any bitching from them either.  Especially since we are no where near the worst yard, there are several who don't take care of  their yards at all, and at least one who only waters his yard on the 4th of July (to lessen the fire potential, we have legal fireworks here).  The rest of the year the dead yellow lawn just bakes in the heat.  At least we do put in some actual effort whenever we can, the lawn is usual mowed and watered regularly, and if Salt Grass in my flower beds is my worst offense, well they can just get the hell over it. 

Hopefully I will be able to get back to posting more often soon.  I have a whole bunch of posts in the planning for you all that might even turn out to be fairly entertaining, I hope to get to those soon.  In the meantime I will leave you with this thought for the day ...