Finding Order in Chaos

I know I've been away from the blog for several months now, and while this type of inactivity is not unheard of from me, hopefully you'll understand my absence when I explain what's been going on.




The past 3 months have been an odyssey in domestic chaos for me.  At the end of October, during the height of Superstorm Sandy's rampage on the east coast, we in Michigan caught some of her tail winds.  They caused varying levels of damage, mostly broken tree limbs in neighboring yards - certainly NOTHING near the devastation our fellow citizens experienced in New Jersey, New York and the New England states.  In our case, my family and I experienced an electrical brown-out.  My initial thought - at least we have some power for lights and small appliances.  That's a good thing, right?  Well, what I've come to learn is a brown-out can be more problematic than a complete black-out.

After nearly two days, the power finally restored to full strength, but with it came a slew of problems.  My hot water heater had to be replaced because it began leaking and flooded our garage.  My refrigerator was damaged by the power surge and it took almost three weeks of repair diagnoses to learn we had to purchase a new one - this just before Thanksgiving, mind you!  We experienced another leak in the laundry room.  And, is if that were not enough, our TV began smoking and almost set our house on fire.  It turned out the power surge damaged the TV's mother board but it didn't start smoking until several weeks later.  And, all of this during Thanksgiving and Christmas holiday preparations.  Needless to say, I was pretty wiped out heading into the new year, so some of my favorite activities were placed on the proverbial back burner - especially sewing and blogging.  And while I'm still working on getting the household back to an organized state, things are finally getting back to "normal".

One of the commitments I had to pause was my contribution to Faye Lewis' sew-along on her "Carnival of Skirts" blog.  The ask was to make 2 skirts by October 31st and publish posts about them.  Needless to say, my submissions are extremely late, but I am so glad she decided to keep the blog up so I can finally finish my skirts and publish my post submission.  Faye, my humblest apologies for being so tardy to the party.  (Yeah...I went RHOA just then.)

There are several other projects I wish to complete, one of which is Butterick 5559 in a claret red ponte knit I purchased from JoAnn last winter.  I'd like to wear it for the Valentine's date I'm thinking about taking Mr. J. on.

Be blessed!

Aisha