Reading Week Wrap-Up

I had a nice break from school this past week--it was SFU's reading break. Last year at this time we went on a short trip to Victoria, but I wasn't taking as many courses as I am now & the workload (particularly the reading) was much lighter. This year I decided to stay home & get some stuff done. I had a laundry list of things I wanted to get to during Reading Week, starting with a celebratory beer. (Really liked this Phillips Ginger beer, which isn't surprising, as I love nearly everything they put out. Check out their current offerings in their site's 'beer fridge')

I've been having lots of fun with our camera lately, so I thought I'd show you what I've been up to with a visual list.

First on the list was to socialize a bit more than I usually get to. I'm in school four days a week & though two days it's only one class, I generally don't manage to squeeze in a visit with anybody before I head up to school in the afternoon. The stars aligned & I managed to get together with my high school friends Cathy & Slavka (with her son Henrik) on the weekend. Then Kiki & Natni came all the way from Coquitlam to visit, wearing the shirts I appliqued for their birthday. The only way I can tell them apart is by their clothing--Kiki tends to wear more pink--so putting the K & the N on their shirts was partly for my benifit. Heh.

Another thing I've been putting off for ages was to sew some hemp diaper inserts from fabric I bought months ago. Heh. After all the procrastinating, it probably took me under an hour to decide how big to make them, lay out & cut the fabric, then serge the edges. I kept them really simple: two layers of fleece serged together in a long rectangle that will be folded in half before stuffing in a pocket diaper or laying inside a cover.

I intended to read an article/chapter a day for my classes, though that didn't go so well. Most of my reading is articles downloaded onto my laptop. I refuse to waste tons of money & paper printing each one out, but it's hard to stay focussed when Facebook & Blogger are just a click away. This article was particularly thrilling. Sigh.

I also decided to get Sprout sleeping in his crib for naps. It was really great to have him napping in his stroller so we could go out whenever & he'd sleep as needed, but as that no longer works, we needed to get him actually using his crib during the day. There was a lot of protest & it took ages for us to get him to sleep, but it worked eventually. He actually slept much longer in his crib than he usually did in the stroller, at home or no. One day he slept FOUR HOURS STRAIGHT.

Part of the reason I've been putting off a lot of sewing projects is because my sewing room is a HUGE mess. (Or, it was a huge mess, now it's a large mess with a small island of calm in the middle. I cleared my desk off, at least. Note the overflowing garbage bin on the lower right. I was able to recycle a lot of stuff, but the tiny bits of fabric, thread snippets & dead markers--what can you do with those?

I've been trying to 'minimalize' my kitchen cabinets over the past while & I did a tiny bit more of that by baking some muffins, & making fancy strawberry banana pancakes. I'm trying to use up the stores of frozen stuff & baking supplies that are getting a bit old. I added chocolate chips to the bran muffin recipe, not thinking about the consequences of feeding them to Sprout. Sticky, chocolatey mess on his clothes. Argh.

So, all in all, it was a somewhat productive week, though not for reading, so much.