Quilt, Europe, books.

Vickey came over early today to drop off my finished quilt on her way to visiting her sister in Baltimore. I’d dropped a quilt top off at Vickey’s mom (Gina) in Dec of last year and she has a quilting machine and finished it off for me. Gina kind of scolds me for sending my quilting out instead of having her do it for free, but I both feel like 1) it seems like a lot of time to ask of her and 2) I’m embarrassed about my quilting skill in front of Gina and she’ll get to carefully examine my seams when she finishes a quilt for me. Anyways, the quilting is done – I’ll need to put a nameplate on it and I have just the person for it. Bert played in a box (and played the piano for us!)

We are putting the final touches on our summer European trip this weekend, reserving the hotel room, flights, coordinating with family and friends in Europe for meeting times. We budgeted about 15K for this trip as this is the last summer trip with Vince at home, I’m hoping we come in under that but I do get nervous spending that much money at once. We have one friend of Vince’s who is coming with us for the first two weeks – through the London, Stockholm and Berlin portions of the trip. We still need to buy the intra-European flights. I did book the family into a youth hostel in London after I booked the boys into a central London youth hostel and looked at hotels in the area that were easily 3x as much money and then just decided to book me Jeremy and Edda into a private hostel room. Sometimes this is not a good idea. We’ll see. I honestly thought I’d never make it to London during this lifetime (mostly because I’m a homebody and I don’t get out so much and omg, the time change is going to kill me and what reason is there ever to go to London), so I’m going to enjoy it as much as my jet lagged person will be able to enjoy it.

I care nothing about the Super Bowl. Vince is party hopping in the neighborhood – he went to one at 7 pm, came home at 7:30 and then off at 8 to another party he heard of.

I am reading Samantha Power’s memoir. This might be the first memoir that I’ve read who is my contemporary. She is two years older than me and it’s just fascinating to read her life story and having the timeline of world events coincide with the timeline of my life. It is incredible how much chutzpah she has – cold calling editors of the Washington Post and NPR and various other people at the State Dept at the ages of 23-25. I’ve only gotten to the part where she meets Obama.

Lest you think that I only read high-brow, I did spend half of January reading this book – this one is pure fluff. Fluffy.