On Syndication, Double Sided tape and Bumpy Cows. . . .





The thought crossed my mind the other day that I hadn't been keeping this blog up very well at all. Another thought crossed my mind that sometimes the layers of my life are downright boring and if I kept up a journal regularly, the pages would yawn.



Patty, Maribeth and Me
Cookies and Milk

But, all is not lost because I do have some super fantastic news! On February 1st, the "Cookies and Milk" ladies (photo on top), found out we are now SYNDICATED. Yup, Mr. Ryan, true to his word, spoke to the other newspapers in the Brown Publishing Group and we got to see our page in two other papers this month. We are still waiting for one county to run the page and another to say, "Yes."





While it's exciting, it also means we have to regroup. We are spread out all over Southwest Ohio, so now we have to figure out contest deadlines to accomadate other papers, if our prizes need revamping and probably a lot of stuff we haven't even thought about. I'm sure Dear Abby had to start somewhere---I'm just not sure if she learned to juggle first. Working for a newspaper requires the skills of a circus juggler--who would have known?





So many things seem to be springing from the page too--like the Laura party. In case you didn't know, Feb. 7 was Laura Ingalls Wilder's 110th birthday. Patty wondered if we couldn't have a program at the library, featuring slides from my trip two years ago to Little House sites. From there it spun out into an actual party which will take place on the 20th. Since I'm the featured narrator, I go between hoping a lot of people show up and hoping that no one other than the kids I'm bringing come. One thing I do know---I refuse to wear my sunbonnet!








We got a BIG SNOW last week. The weather men predicted it with so much glee you'd have thought they owned the market on snow shovels and snow plows. Right before the flakes began to pile up, I headed to Walmart for necessities to see me through the storm. A universal remote since my last remote went to the Island of Lost Things and has never returned. I was getting tired of watching the first Big Valley on my DVD's. There was life past the number one slot and I refused to be snowed in without finding it.





Also ran down the scrapbook aisle for double sided tape. I finally decided my ability to use glue runners was in serious doubt and I'd better look for options. ( Having spent several pleasant hours scrapbooking this past Sunday, I am now certain of one thing. Double sided tape is not any better than a glue runner. When it wasn't stuck to my fingers on one side, it was stuck to whatever it landed on as I struggled to pull a sticky side OFF my fingers and place it down on the page. I've come to a firm conculsion. There's a lot to be said for good old glue sticks.)





Remote, double sided tape, three cans of peas, cat food, bird food, a hot fudge cake mix and a new cartridge for my printer---I was ready to survive the storm. Oh, and I bought four new colors of DMC floss.

The floss is for the Bumpy Cow part of this post. Several years ago, I fell in love with a state fair sampler that I just HAD to do in counted cross stitch. It took me a few years after that to buy the Aida cloth for the project because it had to be measured. Once I had that, it took me a whole summer to finish the roller coaster on top. I was making progress--or so I thought. It didn't take long to discover I'd added an extra upbeam to the roller coaster, throwing the whole project seven squares off. If you've ever done CCS, you can see the tragedy in being even one square off. I put it away and didn't even think about it until this summer. A row of cows were next and I figured if I counted one extra space between the five cows I could somehow come out even. Simple arithmatic. (This is probably not a true statement. If you put me and math in the same sentence, nothing is simple.)

I started the cows full of enthusiam, rejoicing in how well the black thread looked so neat. It wasn't until I began to fill in the white parts of the cows that they started to look, well, bumpy. For some reason I had cows with neat black patches and bumpy white. Then yesterday I discovered that my math had been off and one cow overshoots the space where he's suppose to end. So now I'm going to have to add more grass to the sides of the roller coaster.

My question to myself is this: If one cow overshoots the end of the roller coaster, what's going to happen to the Mason jars of pickles in the next row? Or the row of horses after that? Or the corn cobs? Will any of it end of being symettrical? Or can I make my mistakes look like a pattern?