In which I illustrate why I'm not blogging

Some blogs are brief and make high impact with few words and meaningful pictures.  Usually, my blogs are the opposite.  I'm a lousy photographer and I am wordy as hell, so a brief blog is a rare treat from me.

However, I thought I'd briefly share some photos to illustrate just how badly I've let my projects get out of hand.  That gives me an excuse to blog, which I need to do for my mental well-being, without taking too much time away from my aforementioned tasks.

 The first project is time sensitive.  A few friends and I are sewing stockings for a local charity that has a Christmas Shoppe (to be held later this week) for people in financial straits every year.  The mission will stuff the stockings; all we are doing is sewing.  But since I'm only a mediocre seamstress whose seams wouldn't pass inspection at the School for the Blind, this is a tall order for me:

This is the stack of 25 or so completed stockings.  I did not try to make them photogenic...this is just the finished pile.  Now have a look at the pile to be finished, ahem, today, if possible:

The photo makes it difficult to appreciate the size of this pile, but there may be somewhere on the order of 125 stockings, to be pinned and sewn.  It's sad to be a person who doesn't know their own limits (all together now:  "Poor Michele.")  And just to make sure that the psychological torture gets handed down to the next generation, have a look at Christmas Craft Central, formerly the dining room, where the girls and I are making some lovely gifts that will likely garner admiration for the remainder of 2010, until they end up in a drawer:

 

When you see all of this, you may think, "Well, she's finished with her shopping and wrapping and decorating, so why not do homemade crafts and sew for the less fortunate?"  But you would be dead wrong to think this.  Here is our tree:

Pretty, of course, but quite bare at the moment.  Gotta get on that.


Here are the Christmas presents I've bought:

hiding in the corner of my bedroom, unwrapped.  There are a few more scattered about, but I have a long way to go to be done with presents.


Then we have the Thanksgiving decorations that haven't managed to get put away.  They are waiting for the arrival of the empty Rubbermaid tubs, which I cannot find in all this mess!  I would have taken pictures of the boxes of Christmas decorations, but they are in the attic and that's just too much like work, so just use your imagination.

Would it surprise you to know that I've offered to host not one, but two, parties in this delightful mess of a house in the coming weeks?  Clearly, I need intense therapy.  Or a personal assistant.

I've rested my eyes long enough.  I've got to get back to the sewing machine and the messiest Christmas stockings ever.  Whichever misguided person originally espoused the idea that "homemade is better" should proceed directly to my house for some "ho-ho-hos" of rather uncharitable mirth - my craftiness is so bad, it's funny.  Then I will shoot that person, and blog about it from jail.


And to top it off, I still wasn't brief, was I?