The best laid plans ...

I should know better. Going in to this weekend I looked at Gloucester and figured that I should be able to easily finish the second front by the end of Saturday, finish the pockets and be rolling on the sleeves by the end of Sunday. It was not particularly ambitious but I really figured that all I had left after Friday night was a single evening of work on the front.

Then my cell phone broke. Again. This is the second phone that has gone wonky on me in the barely 4.5 weeks that we have had the new phones and the third one to malfunction in 5 weeks. The first was dying a premature death after barely a year of use but we were switching plans anyway so it was not too big a deal. The next two are just plain annoying since they are fancy, all-in-one devices that I absolutely love because I now carry only one device where I was previously carrying 3. And, I now use my PDA all the time where it was not getting the use it should since having it and my cell phone out at the same time was an invitation to lose one. However, do not despair, our service provider was surprisingly nice and replaced the phone again, without charge. (It better have been without charge -- the phone was only 2 weeks old each time.) Please note, Mike has the same phone and it is working just fine but ... If you have a Treo 650 and use the hands-free frequently, do not be surprised if you lose the ability to talk without the hands-free. It is a known problem.

Anyhow, here is Gloucester:


And here is another project that kept me from working on it:



The above are the raw ingredients for Wampum. Below is one of the resulting Wampum.



Why, I hear you asking, are you attempting to make Wampum. Because the Male child was distressed that his macaroni Wampum had broken and Daddy promised that we could buy clams to make "real" Wampum while also providing spaghetti with clam sauce for dinner. Daddy, obviously, did not think this through and so Mommy found her self hammering and drilling clam shells last night. Male child is doing the smoothing himself.

Yes, we know that Wampum are round but this is making Male Child happy.

The last reason why Gloucester is not further along is that our neighbors had an emergency this morning and asked us to please watch their boys. I do not begrudge Gloucester progress at all for this -- they are lovely kids and we had a very nice time playing and reading while their parents dealt with important matters. It is very nice to have neighbors who can be counted on in an emergency and I am glad to be able to help them as they have helped us in the past. Hey, what are friends for.