I have to fist thank everyone for your sweet and heart felt comments on yesterday's post. Unfortunately I didn't get a good night's sleep again last night as Sunshine had me up 4 times, but I'm hopeful that tonight will be better.

Last night was a good night. After the kidlets and I got home from work/school, they played nicely together (mostly) while I played with Lucy and got the last Quilt U Be Mine quilt additions done. It will be off in the mail to its owner today. Here is a little sneak peak.

Deciding what sort of center block is usually the hard part and I've been looking at numerous books and sites for inspiration. Luckily I came across an idea a few days ago that I really like. I even picked the fabrics I will use while the little ones played in the tub. Hopefully tomorrow afternoon I'll cut a few squares, sew together some HST and put a new block together.

Tomorrow will be a day that I've been looking forward to for weeks. A friend and I are going to rent time on an Innova long arm machine and hopefully get a few tops quilted. I've been itching to try out this machine and I hope it lives up to my expectations. Wish me luck and I promise to show you my progress as soon as I get a chance.

The title of this post is so accurate. These past weeks have been anything but normal. Sunshine was healing fairly well from her surgery but then over the weekend she got really sick and now is dealing with a sinus infection plus bronchitis. Adding nebulizer treatments 3 times a day to our otherwise busy schedule is just dandy!

There has been very little time to sew. I did manage about an hour yesterday and had hoped to finish sewing on the last border addition to the final Quilt U Be Mine block that I have to work on but dinner and jammies and then bedtime interfered with that plan. I haven't gotten a full night's sleep in 2 weeks so by the time I sit down with the kidlets to quiet them down for going to dreamland, I've been nodding off myself. That certainly puts a damper on getting back to my studio once they drift off.

In the days after Sunshine's surgery, I had expected to be able to get a bunch of sewing time in. I figured that her doses of Tylenol with Codeine would have her napping a ton. Not. I spent a great deal of time snuggling with her on the couch, watching cartoon and Disney movies. Hey anything my baby girl wanted was the rule of the day. The only thing I did manage to complete was this.

Up until now, I have been good. Very good. So far this year I have resisted buying any fabric. None at all up to this point. In many ways I am very proud of myself for being strong and saving my pennies. While there have been some that I have liked, there are only a few that have passed my litmus test and are now on my wish list, just waiting for a sale to come along. But then a few days ago while catching up on blog reading I saw this bundle of fabrics that Jane bought

(pictures borrowed from her blog, I'm sure she doesn't mind).
I instantly fell in love. Yes this line of fabrics pass my "suck in my breath I've GOT to have it test" and I immediately asked her what line it is and where she got it. She sent me the link so that I had all the details. Unfortunately the shop she bought her stack from didn't have all of the prints any longer and if I am going to buying any fabric these days, I need to minimize the shipping costs and hence the need to find as much of what I want in the same place. Lucky for me Fabric.com had almost all of the red prints in stock and since I bought enough, I got free shipping plus I was able to use a 10% off coupon. Double score. Hopefully when they get the 3 missing ones that I also want restocked in March, I'll be able to get those too.

I bought 1/2 yards of each of these 11 prints and once the other 3 are available, I'll have a gorgeous stack of 14 lovely fabrics to create an awesome Christmas quilt with. So many of the Christmas lines don't appeal to me but this one does in so many ways. No I haven't a clue yet as to what I will do with them, but rest assured I'll be thinking about that a lot and hopefully coming up with an idea before too long.

Another "Must Make" has now been added to my already very long list. Figuring out which ones are going to come first, other than the 6 deadline ones that are at the top of the list, will be tough. I just want to play with them all!

Update #2....I just logged in usind Safari as the browser instead of Internet Explorer and low and behold, the missing blogs magically reappeared in my Google Reader account. But then again the same blogs that I keep unsubscribing did too. So I don't know if this is mainly a Google Reader problem or an Internet Explorer problem or a combination of both. I was using IE on the laptop last night and on the desktop yesterday when all those long ago posts suddenly appeared. I just don't have any clue as to what is going on at this point.

Update: I purposedly didn't read the posts in my reader for Leah Day's Free Motion Quilting Project. I wanted to save those for when I had more time to really concentrate. But when I logged in this morning, that blog isn't even showing at all in my reader. It totally disappeared overnight. AGGGG! Someone, anyone...if you can help me, please help me stop this craziness.

This isn't the 1st time that I've ranted about this problem but I'm truly hoping that someone out there has some idea of what is going on so that this can stop happening.

I log into my Google Reader pretty much every single day, mostly first thing in the morning while the rest of the family is still sleeping. Some days I only get a half hour, some days I get two to three time that much time to catch up. Although on some days I don't get through all the unread posts in my Reader, I typically am able to finish them all within another day or two.

Yesterday was no different. I had about 38 unread posts, was working my way through them, saw my name listed on Marlene's "Let's Go Visiting" post and immediately wrote my post for the event. Once I hit "Publish" I went back to my Google Reader and you'll never guess what I saw next.

Not the balance of the original unread 38 posts....not my reader account said that I had 183 unread posts. As of this very moment there are 221. The largest number for one blog is 18, dating back a number of weeks.

This makes absolutely no sense and it is driving me insane! Why in the world isn't Google Reader updating ALL of my subscriptions on a timely bases? I'm missing out on a ton of great things and it is pissing me off. I'm truly hoping that one of you out there have some idea of what is happening and knows how I can solve this problem once and for all. It doesn't matter whether or not the computer is totally shut down for the day or not...this continues to happen.

The other thing that I can't stand is that subscriptions that I have Unsubscribed to over and over and over continue to show up in my Reader. Annoying, really annoying.

Do any of you know much about Google Reader and can help me? Or do you know of an IT person that might have some clue and can help stop this torture? If so I would forever be in your debt.