Charlotte Countdown, Broken Sinks and Early Morning Phone calls...

Today is New Brunswick Day here in our province, a holiday that many provinces get to make up for the fact that Quebec has the St. Jean Baptiste holiday in June. After all, it isn’t fair if one province gets an extra statutory holiday per year that the rest of the country doesn’t! The weird thing is, almost every province names this 1st Monday in August something different (though most name it something to do with the Province) so every year we confuse lots and lots of tourists. This year’s calendar just has “Civic Holiday- Canada” written there, which is correct unless you are in Quebec, so that must be how calendar companies cope with this quirky Canadian holiday.

The fact that EVERYTHING except emergency services and some pharmacies or convenience stores are closed today has also made the countdown to leaving for Charlotte a bit trickier. We made sure to get our US money out of the bank late last week, though it put us in line with everyone else who wanted money before the holiday. We got the last of our photocopying and printer cartridges from Staples, to be sure to have what we needed as the last of the new designs got batched up to sell. All seemed to be fairly under control until last night after supper.

Yes, less than an hour after the stores closed on Sunday, our kitchen sink faucet decided to break a small plastic ring/seal which sent water spewing everywhere! We quickly got the water shut off at the source, but will now have to lug water from the taps upstairs to do mundane things like dishes and rinsing vegetables. Paper plates might take care of some of that, but both Nick and I found it a bit frustrating. As an adult, you just can’t throw a hissy fit because something shows an incredible lack of timing when it breaks. Much as I wanted to stomp around the house and yell “This isn’t fair, this is the LAST thing I need right now before the show!” I took a deep breath and reminded myself that some people in this world have to walk 4 km to gather a pot full of dirty water to stay alive. We take SO much for granted sometimes.

The girls stayed up fairly late to watch a movie while Nick stitched and I batched patterns. He’d gotten a fair chunk done on the model for Santa’s Dragon when he discovered that one section was off by ONE thread. A hazard when you stitch over 2 on linen. Once we got the kids down, I took over and managed to track down where the problem was. After a but of frogging on both our parts and one tiny section I can just change in the final chart rather than rip out, we were off to bed just before the stroke of midnight.

This morning, we were both jolted out of sleep by a phone call from a stitcher who fully expected to get a Dragon Dreams answering machine. Nick explained that this is also our home phone number and then just passed the cordless phone to me. I was able to wander down to the office in my jammies and find the information that she needed as well as have a lovely chat with her. I never begrudge phone calls like that, but it does feel just a little strange to be wide awake early on a morning that I’d planned to sleep in a bit! Oh well, more time to stitch and pack!!!

I also have to meet with the author tonight or tomorrow to go over the last batch of pencil sketches so that once Charlotte is behind me, the last 7 drawings can be completed. Erin joked about the summer flying by but that she’d had a great break from school.... and I just grinned. I’m not sure this summer feels like I really had a rest, but I will always look back on this time with a sense of pride and amazement. Pride that I finally illustrated a children’s book and produced designs that I am very pleased with... and amazement that I survived trying to do both at once!!