Yes, what is normal, I ask? I am yearning for some days – maybe a whole week – when I can just stay home and do my magic with thread, cloth, dye and paint. It seems as if I am constantly grabbing a few minutes here and there and spending the rest of my time in meetings, entertaining guests (which I love), doing errands, you know – all that stuff that gets in the way of our creativity.

I had an SDA staff conference call at 8 am. Then, I snuck down stairs to make a larger thermofax screen of one of the grafittis. Back upstairs, got cleaned up and headed downtown with Mr C to look at condos. Home in the early afternoon, had a late lunch, went grocery shopping and fabric paint shopping, walked the dog and made dinner. Back to the studio to do some test prints and then settled down to some stitching on the second blue moon piece.

I found a better green for the printing I want to do. The test print is up there. I tried an electric blue for the other one.

I am going to sleep on these and decide on printing the actual quilt tomorrow.

Here is my progress on the moon stitching

The condo looking was very informative. Just to be clear, we are not putting our home on the market until January and after we sell it, we will decide on our next move. I know I am not ready for the senior housing with the scrabble at 4 pm and a bus ride to the concert.

We do want to be down town where we spend a lot of our time. We want to rely less on  a car and be near public transportation. We looked at 3 different areas of Portland — the south waterfront and the waterfront near the trend Pearl District, both of which are near the trolley. Then we drove to the west side of the city and looked at an older condo on the hillside above a very nice area of Portland which is very near Trinity. We just wanted to wak into some and imaging ourselves living there.

We did not like the townhouse in the south waterfront area. It is a huge area of condo buildings and office buildings with not much ambiance and pretty far from the places we like to frequent. We really like the buildings neat the Pearl. They were new and nicely appointed and seemed to have the accommodations we are looking for. It would be a short trolley ride to the place I plan to have a studio. They are very sound proof condos. There is also a nice fitness area.

The condo on the west side is a great location. We love it up there. There is a patio that backs up to a lovely wooded hillside. The downside is older and grimy bathrooms and a kitchen that I would need to update. There is carpeting which I can’t live with because of my dust allergies. We would need to get a great deal so that we had money to make the improvements. This is all moot because who knows what will be available in four months from now. But, it was educational.