The Best of Friends

I have plenty of stuff to blog from my westward journey, but I am short on time, so I will focus on the No. 1 highlight.

My mini-group of quilters, the M&Ms (stands for Melrose Mondays), all met on Thursday night at Sandy’s house. Sandy always hosts the group, and they moved this meeting off of Monday, Feb. 10 in honor of my visit. I stayed at Sandy's house for three nights on the trip (Tue-Wed-Thu) before going to Palm Springs for a softball tournament.


Left-right, Beth, Anne, Sandy, Lisa, Me (holding RT), Denise, Carol and Nonie.

OK, so it has been five days and I’m still feeling a little teary getting ready to write this.

When I attended my last M&Ms meeting as a California resident back in June, I found out that this group had decided that they wanted to make a quilt for me. On Thursday night, it was unveiled.


This isn’t the greatest picture. I know that Sandy’s friend Penny (visiting from Chicago … and she has a quilt that will hang at Paducah! Wow!) was snapping away as I turned into a watery mess as I saw this for the first time. I'll take better pictures when I'm home again for more than 48 hours.

I picked the background/border fabric at Ginger’s back in June. The group did the rest. I slept under the quilt that night at Sandy’s then it got safely tucked away until I got it home on Monday morning. I was unwilling to give it to the airlines as a check bag or to the post office to ship, so I did some serious stuff juggling so it would fit in my computer bag. Actually, it was the only thing that would fit in my computer bag. Aside from my actual computer, of course.

I’ll get better pictures of it later, once I get home from the upcoming trip-that-shall-not-be-discussed.

Fortunately/unfortunately, the quilt was not the only thing I picked up in LA during the first two days of my trip. It seemed like after i hugged every single person I saw, they handed me something to take home.


Here you see all of it. Only numbers 1 and 2 came with me from Pittsburgh. Here’s the down and dirty:

1. Bear, 2. Roaming Tigger, 3. The best chocolate covered pretzels ever, gift from Sandy, from Trader Joe’s, 4. A shot glass from Cal State LA for the Hubster, 5. Shot glass from UCLA for the Hubster, 6. Undersleeves [a], 7. Travel shirt [a], 8. Practice T-shirts [a], 9. Sponsorship plaque from golf tournament [a], 10. UCLA table runner kit from Sandy, 11. TRX trainer from the person I trained with the last six months I was at UCLA, 12. The 18 yards of fabric I picked up for $100 at Ginger’s (oopsies), 13. Visor [a], 14. Shorts scammed from Lori so I could work out in the weight room on Thursday morning, 15. Practice shorts (2 pr) [a] 16. CD calendar from Ginger’s, 17. UCLA men’s basketball media guide, 18. Leftover fabric from quilt, 19. The actual queen-sized quilt. A 20th item, a really neat glass Christmas ornament that Ali (who blogs but won't tell me where) got for me, had already been carefully packed away for the trip home, and I forgot to pull it out for this photo (I know Ali reads the blog, so you should know that we love it! Chris even oohed and aahed over it and he NEVER does that!). Forgot to take a pic of it now, so somebody remind me when I get home again, m'kay?

Stuff with the [a] designation came from Bruin softball/Ali.

Yeah. I had to buy a $10 Wal-Mart duffel to get everything home.

There’s plenty more to talk about from the trip. I saw a million people who I miss terribly, zipped around the California freeways (including the 405, 10, 110, 210, 57, 605, and 105!) like I never left and I blew through business cards in Palm Springs like they were water, but that was the point.

I had a really tough day with The Job today. I’m getting the feeling that people in the home office are cheering for me to fail over the next two weekends at our “big” tournaments, and that just isn’t going to happen. I’ll talk to the boss at some point over the 12 days I’m gone, but let me tell you – I’m most certainly taking a personal day when I get home, because this has gotten ridiculous.

I have a whack of photos stored on Flickr and hopefully I can find some time to blog while I’m gone. It can’t possibly be as busy as the LA trip was, can it?

I miss my normal routine, although who knows what my “normal” is these days. That said, I leave in the morning and won’t be home again until March 10. I look forward to finding myself again at that point. I’ll be back, hopefully soon! ☺