A Day in the Life

YLCF is doing a blog carnival this week, and this is my contribution...

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It's Friday morning, a few minutes before 7 as my alarm clock beeps. Anyone who has ever been around me in the morning knows I am *not* a morning person. Never have been. It's the way God made me. ;-) Thursdays are my late class night, and I don't usually walk through the door until 10:30PM...last night, true to form, I wasn't in bed until after midnight. I'm tempted to shut the ol' alarm clock off and go back to sleep for another half an hour, but there are things to be done. Instead, I groan in the same key as the floorboards above me that my mom is still stomping around on (she leaves for work at 7:30), and take a few minutes in bed to read my Bible (I'm in Matthew...what about you?), and a chapter of The Bravehearted Gospel by Eric Ludy. Hearing my sister emerge from our shared bathroom, I roll out of bed and head that way for my turn.

Bed made, clothes on, face applied, and hair done, I finally hurry upstairs at 9AM to help my sis finish getting her lunch bag put together. She knows more than to expect any conversation from me...I don't feel a part of the human race until I've had my tea in the morning. No time for breakfast or a leisurely tea sip, I brew my cup for the morning in my Japanese Starbucks mug, and we're out the door at 9:15. I don't usually skip breakfast, but this morning, we're going to try something new. Having seen dancing cows on streetcorners yesterday, my sister has told me that Chick-Fil-A has free breakfasts on Friday. I've never been to Chick-Fil-A for any meal, breakfast or otherwise, so I'm eager to check the place out. (And I feel compelled to mention also that I eat breakfast "out" so rarely, that I don't even remember when the last time was...probably a couple years ago...) Thankfully, there's a Chick-Fil-A on the way to my sister's job, so we stop there to pick up two of their cinnamon clusters, and I eat mine and enjoy my tea as I finish the drive, dropping my sister off at work.

After meeting her new co-worker, I head to our church. I am teaching one of their "creative home nights" this Monday...ten ladies in my group will be making gingerbread houses. I have never taught anyone to make a gingerbread house before...I always figured it was pretty intuitive. Anyway, we are assembling the houses from kits (horrors! ;-D) ahead of time. I meet two other ladies, and we spend the next three hours trying to figure out how to get very lopsided pieces of gingerbread to stay up long enough for the royal icing holding them together to dry. I chat for a few minutes with the church secretary about a babysitting situation that came up last Sunday, and then it's out the door to head home.

On the way home, it occurs to me I should stop at the fabric store. Now, I rarely need a valid excuse to stop at my favorite designer fashion fabrics store, but I actually have a reason today! This evening, one of my sister's former co-workers is coming over and we are going to design her wedding dress. I want to check what Denver Fabrics has in stock, so we can do some preliminary fabric discussion. I manage to make it out of the store without buying anything (an amazing feat for a fabric addict like me!), and, not being able to think of any more stops I should make, arrive home around 2 o'clock.

It's time for lunch! I'm in a hurry, so it's a bowl of shredded wheat while I fill out an online student opinion survey for my school. I grab some frozen hamburger out of the freezer to defrost for dinner, and then I do a little house cleaning to get my workroom, which doubles as my living room and computer room, ready for my customer tonight (and while I'm at it, I tidy up the kitchen, bathroom and my bedroom).

In the middle of a cleaning tornado, my guinea piggie starts begging for her afternoon vegetable, so I take a break to feed her and watch a program on the DVR. (Yes, I watch TV mid-day!) Then it's back to cleaning, which ends up taking much longer than I expected.

It's 5:30, and all the cleaning that's left is to vacuum the upstairs kitchen. I get dinner started, tossing my still-frozen hamburger in a skillet and digging out a can of refried beans, chopping vegetables, setting the table, and generally running around like a chicken with its head cut off. ;-) My working family will be home and hungry soon, and my customer is coming around 7PM.

My mom comes home, and promptly leaves again to pick up my sister from work while I finish dinner. It's 6:30 before we all finally sit down. In days past, we usually ate every meal of the day together, but now between three full-time jobs and my school schedule, we're thankful to have three or four dinners together per week.

My customer calls around 6:45...she won't be able to make it until 8:30. I am both bugged and thankful about this because I know I won't be ready for her at 7, but it also means a later evening than I had anticipated.

We all work together to clean up from dinner, and then I get to work on a couple mending/alterations projects I have for other clients. I don't particularly enjoy alterations and mending (to put it mildly), but at this season of life, I am taking whatever sewing jobs I can get. Right around 8:30, my customer arrives, accompanied by her 16-year-old son, which surprises me. He turns out to be a quiet boy, though, who spends our appointment talking to my guinea pig and looking through my sister's cake photo albums. Meanwhile, Leslie and I thumb through my pattern books. She doesn't know what she wants beyond a 50's style, tea-length dress, but she says she'll know what she wants when she sees it. Thankfully, she sees it after only a few minutes of looking through my 500+ vintage patterns, and "it" happens to be one of my favorites! We set a date to meet to go fabric shopping, and they leave around 9:30.

Knowing I need to have my mending and alterations jobs done before Sunday, I get back to work. These things always take longer than I expect, and after fighting my sewing machine tension for a while, and ripping out a couple things and re-doing them, it is 11PM, and I am ready to be done for the night.

After a quick shower, I crawl into bed and thumb through my most recent High Country Gardens catalog while listening to the end of my current Out to Canaan audiobook CD. It's 11:45PM when I shut off my bedside light, remember a few friends "as brought to mind" in prayer, and finally go to sleep...

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Care to share a day in your life?