We have reclaimed our house!!! We brought the nieces back home this afternoon :-) We love them dearly, and we enjoy having them up, but..... compared to our lifestyle of just the two of us, never blessed with kiddos of our own, it is so hectic to have them up here. In fact, the first thing out of my brother's mouth when we arrived at their door was, "You're back? It is so much nicer when you are not here!" He meant that, of course, in his own humorous way... but he meant it, nonetheless :-) Now we see all of Mike's sweets and all of our Coke is gone.... they eat like little vaccuum cleaners :-) We are exhausted here!

I am posting a progress pic of my The Mermaid and the Sea WIP on Sea Mist 40 ct Graziano linen from The Blended Needle - in the Color Blooms section on the site... I saw this chart stitched up as a model once on a neat Caribbean type blue, so that gave me the idea to do it on this fabric.... so far, I like it - but, it is time to put it away for a little bit because I am now about to start Houses of Hawk Run Hollow - yaaaaaaaaaaaay!

There is a new update to Mike's car accident now - the man who hit him never got back in touch with him after he told him the estimate for the damage was $1,200. So, Mike got in touch with our auto insurance company and found out that this guy told his insurance company that Mike caused the accident by both of them being in a gas station... he tried to claim that Mike was parked at the pump in front of him and 'decided to get a different grade of gas so he backed his car up' thereby allegedly hitting this guy's truck. Scam artist!! Anyhow... the significant amount of damage to Mike's Jeep shows that his story is utterly implausible.... so Mike had to make a verbal affidavit to our insurance company and they are pursuing this. Mike then wrote to the guy's insurance company citing the laws about insurance fraud... although a programmer by trade, my DH loves and studies the law, so he was way up on this one.... This idiot will surely end up regretting the lie he is telling to the two insurance companies! To add insult to injury now.... Mike discovered last night that his brakes and drive train did not feel right on his Jeep. He later noticed when he went out to our garage that his brake lights were still on. It took him a bit of mucking around to get them to turn off. So, it appears that this guy caused even more damage than ever expected or noticed before... so the Jeep will have to go back to Allen Motors in Derry, NH this week for an estimate on this damage, on top of the estimate for the body damage.... and this lying idiot is up the creek now! Geez.... I feel bad for Mike, he has to drive this possibly unsafe Jeep to work on Monday.... We took the girls home in my Jeep today, as we did not want to risk their safety in any way, of course....

Contributing to today's utter feeling of exhaustion is our eldest cat, Beau, who will be 8 years old on 4/4/05, has developed another outbreak of feline acne. This is apparently very common in Persian cats, and I have noticed that my other five all show some small signs of the same problem. Anyhow, I will have to do a lot less stitching and a lot more tending to his hygienic and medical needs tonight....poor little guy.

To keep track of my resolution to stitch daily, I will be logging it here in my blog - might get annoying to all of you guys to read, so please just ignore my daily entry that shall read:

Stitched on today: Houses of Hawk Run Hollow