How can I resist those eyes? The eyes of an unspoiled, unloved, unplayed with puppy… Yeah, right!

I can’t believe that I have been in California for a month. So far, I am loving it. California smells so good. Seriously. It’s perfume, but not overpowering, just incredibly pleasant. And I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to actually be able to smell it. I have some bad allergies and can be pretty congested which makes the sniffer pretty useless. But my allergies are in check, and I am enjoying the scent of California. I asked Bill what Maryland smelled like and he said it was more piney and mossy. I’ve never really noticed how a place smells (except for New Jersey and parts of Delaware). I’ve talked to a couple of locals and they don’t notice it, but it is wonderful.

Moving one, we have made excellent progress on the unpacking department. As in, we are fully unpacked and almost everything is put away. Yay! We really pushed last weekend, starting in one end of the house and moved to the other end, not leaving a room until it was done. There are little projects here and there that need to be completed, but isn’t that always the case. It feels like home now and that’s a very good feeling.

A big project that we have left is the garage. Yikes. I started to work in there and get it organized but it scares me. Part of the problem is that we have put all the garage sale stuff in there and that’s a lot of stuff. I’m thinking about doing the garage sale next weekend so that we can just be done with it. I’ll see how I feel on Monday. I think a couple of hours everyday would have me ready by Saturday AM.

This is the first week that I’ve really been able to get into an ideal routine. Get up in the AM and go for a walk, take the dog to the park, get cleaned and dressed, and then work on sewing or knitting, or whatever I feel like. Little break for lunch, some more “work” and then wait for Bill to come home for dinner. It has been very pleasant.

I’ve also been spending a fair amount of time watching the Stanley Cup playoffs. Go Blackhawks!!! And my schedule also revolves around the Cubs games. Cubs day games start at 11am here which I am still getting used to. I like to have the games on while I “work” and the early start time does work well with my schedule.

My sewing has been pillow-centric of late. It has been a long time since I’ve sat at my sewing machine. I think it got packed away in mid-March. In that time, I’ve forgotten how to do zippers. I’m experimenting with zippered pillows because you can get a tighter fit, and I made my first zippered cover in March and that was it. So it took me a little bit of time to figure it out again. Zippers perplex me. My first zippered cover of today took an hour and a half. My second took me about 45 minutes. Hopefully the next once takes even less time.

The zippered covers are for my kitchen. I’ve also been working on pillows for the guest room. I have big 26×26 inch pillows which were naked, but now they have covers. And I embellished some pillow cases. Which will send me off on a tangent. Martha Stewart has some interesting bedroom decorating ideas on her website. One of them was to embroider a pillowcase with the initials of your guest. Lovely, but WHO has time to do that. Seriously. WHO? It’s bugging me because I can’t find it on her website but I know I read it. The rest of the ideas were good, but that one just didn’t seem reasonable to me.

Moving on, I can’t finish the pillows for the guest room because I ran out of fabric. Thank goodness for Sew Mama Sew. My fabric will be here early next week and then I can finish up that room.

I’ve also started making some reusable shopping bags for my etsy store. I hope to have those ready early next week!

Busy busy busy!