Assuming the freecycler I've heard from comes through, I'll be getting rid of the old sofa and love seat in the Room Of Many Purposes within the next few days. We think the room was originally supposed to be a formal dining room; it has a chair rail and is open to the living room. We aren't 'formal dining room' people, so we tossed in couches and put in a few rickety bookshelves and called it the reading room.

Well, I have my initial answer for the quilt design:

I have little of use or consequence to say, but I'd like to note that all of the stars have been brought to the end of Stage One: Partial Assembly.

See these, down at the bottom of this photo?  All sewn now, baby:

Here we are. The clock on my computer says we have exactly a week to go, and the scary thing is, I think we're more ready than we've been in years past. Jeff brought the Ops server up last night, and I started testing it to make sure the basic functions were ready to go.

I've found a few oddities, and it's not fully functional yet, but I've got a list of fixes and tweaks, and everything looks manageable.

The tickets are booked. I will disappear for a little while in late July, and I would be lying if I did not say that the nighttime pathways of my mind have taken me more than once down the thought of sand between my toes. It's peace and quiet I'm after, both for myself and for the friend who is kind enough to host me, but there is yet much work to do before I can board that plane without undone tasks.I am the sort that is good for crusades; when it comes to code I am more stolid than gifted, as Gareth and several other true coders, whom I count among my friends, can attest.

At this point, it's just plain silliness: the cutting of a spare house key or the run to Kinko's for sixteen color copies. Or, as said to Suzan the other night: "We do all this planning ahead of time so that when we finally get on-site, we can walk away from our lives for nearly a week."