I'm back! Feels like I've been away from this blog for months even though it hasn't been that long. Most of February flew by with doing FEBO and trying to get several contest entries ready to mail. Then, as if I didn't have enough to do, I volunteered to judge a writing contest. That turned out to be an education in itself. Thankfully, I sent off my last judged entry yesterday. FREE AT LAST!

Now I'm deep into writing unit studies to submit to the BIG BOOK FOR BEGINNING TEACHERS. These will go to the same publisher who accepted some of my ideas in December. The deadline is April 28th, so I'm hoping to submit quite a few before then. I've written ten so far but only submitted two. Each lesson has to have a list of related library books for children so I need to do more research before sending those off.

It's been raining all day. The yard, the creek, the back fields are swamps or flooded. My shoes sink into mud everytime I venture outside. Even though itdoesn't look as if spring has arrived, I heard the peepers last night. Spring is coming.

Last week, we had enough sun (in between an ice storm and a blizzard) to make the cats imagine spring had sprung. Smokey and Gray Girl take up their favorite places on the back porch. I can't wait until it's warm enough for me to sit out in the swing and watch them.

To celebrate finishing up all my contest entries and the entries to be judged, I made a white cake with chocolate icing. Even went to the bother of separating the egg whites from the yolks. Most of the time I just toss them all in together and end up with a pale yellowish cake instead. Then, since I was thoroughly tired of writing, I went back to my state fair sampler.

I'm up to the pigs. Well, almost. I discovered when I started the pigs that I hadn't finished the little row of mason jars. Somewhere I'd miscounted and needed to ADD three extra rows of red tiles. So, I am adding red tiles, doing pigs and moving down a line to the row of ice cream cones. The reason I have to move down to the ice cream cones is because I'm out of black and white DMC thread right now. Wal-Mart has decided they will no longer carry embroidery thread. (My protest letter is in the mail!) Will have to wait until I can drive the sixty miles to a fabric store to buy more. I can sew the ice cream cones because I still have red and brown.

So now I can mark off another goal on my to do list from today. I blogged.