Celebrations, Copies and Colour Proofs!!!

Today is Nick’s mother’s birthday, just 3 days after mine. When the girls were lamenting the fact that they didn’t know what to buy for Grammy or have a lot of money to spend on a present a week ago, I suggested that instead of taking her out for dinner tonight, we turn our home into a restaurant just for her. Talk about jumping on the bandwagon! The girls made me call her to find out what her favourite foods were and promised to help me cook the whole meal! We got out the fancy tablecloth, the good cutlery and even candles. Bethany drew the cover of the menu for the Birthday Bistro and Erin printed out the menu for the inside. When Grammy and Papa arrived, the girls were decked out in their nicest dresses with little tea towels over their arms to greet them. It was a fun and hilarious evening that ended with impromptu dancing and a magic show!

I also had a batch of orders to take up to Staples for Hoffman, the trunk show in Saint John this Saturday and two other shop orders that need to be mailed out this week. It reminded me of this time last year. I was up at Staples paying for a huge Hoffman order when I noticed a woman standing at the self-serve copy machine with a gigantic pile of cross stitch charts. I walked over to see how many she was systematically copying and there were easily 120 leaflets in the pile! I introduced myself politely and explained that what she was doing was breaking copyright law. I told her that as a cross stitch designer myself, I knew many of the designers whose work she was copying illegally. When she insisted in broken English that her friend had told her it was OK to copy anything she liked from her collection because patterns were SO expensive, I switched into French and fluently explained the issue in my other language. This did NOT go over well with the lady, but I remained polite and decided to leave instead of throwing a hissy fit in the store. A few days later, the local cross stitch shop told me about a customer stopping by who had been in the store with this lady. Apparently, she decided to buy her own copier so that she could copy patterns at home with out being hassled. After all.... the patterns were so VERY expensive. I wonder how many patterns she could have bought legally for the cost of a copier??

After Staples, I got a few more errands done when the phone rang. The colour proofs of the book were ready for approval!!!! I picked Bethany up from the bus stop and we drove across town to the printers to see the proofs. When she brought them out, the hair on my arms literally stood on end. It was SO COOL to see the colour slicks and the Dylux paper proof of the book flow. Of course I was a bit freaked out when I noticed that one whole galley was missing from the Dylux proof!! Apparently, they’d forgotten to output that center page (both sides) so the story didn’t match up at all... but that was quickly fixed and they stapled up the new sample for Kay and I to approve. Watching her look at the proofs was fun as well. It made all of those late nights seem worth it. In many ways, this is exactly how I felt after the girls were born. At first, you think “I am NEVER going to do this again!!!” but then suddenly, you find yourself thinking about the next one, forgetting about all the sleepless nights, pain etc.

Any creative process is taking the risk to bring something into the world. No wonder so many artists, writers, musicians etc. talk about their creations as being their babies!!!

Escape Weekends, Birthdays and Terrible Head Colds...

What is it about finishing a big deadline or task that invariably has your body crashing afterwards? Nick has been fighting allergies or a cold since going back to school and now I’ve come down with an absolutely horrid head cold... as a birthday present I’d rather NOT have had. Maybe once you get past 40, the warranty begins to run out a bit!

Our family had a glorious weekend of badly needed escape and family time up at Camp Tawasi this past weekend with about 35 other people from our church. It was time to get messy, walk on the beach, sit and chat, play with our kids and just enjoy a recharging weekend in the midst of all the back to school chaos. This is the 4th year that we’ve been and it has become a much-anticipated part of our fall rituals. We even got to try out Bethany’s Dragon Kite... but it spent most of the time diving to earth instead of soaring, which is kind of how this dragon feels right now!

I begin to understand the attraction of doping oneself up on cold medicine... but being hypo-thyroid, I really can’t take most of the drugs out there that would offer relief. Instead, I am honking away into piles of soggy tissue, putting vaseline on my nose so that it won’t feel so chapped, drinking warm liquids, sucking on cough drops and feeling pretty sorry for myself.

But amid all the germs, there were wonderful birthday memories as well. Of 41 cupcakes set on fire up at camp as they sang to me on Sunday morning, calls from family and friends, e-mail greetings from special people, an unexpected bouquet of flowers and some great hugs!! Now if I could just invent a bottomless box of kleenex!!!!!