Hello and see you soon

Good day everyone. This has been one busy week.

A little background - DH and I are Canadians who live in Ontario, Canada on Lake Ontario. Come late October when the rain starts to fall, the leaves start to drop and the wind starts to blow, we pack up our tent and move to Arizona for the winter. When the neighborhood starts to empty and the temperatures climb into the 100's, we head back home.

Many of our friends have folded their tents and headed back to their homes in B.C., Alberta, Washington, Oregon, Missouri and other places across Canada and the U.S. We have said goodbye every day for the past 9 days with either a "Happy Hour", supper out or a "Must Go"(everything left must go) party.It is hard on the diet to eat out so often. We ladies had to do our last minute shopping (every day for the past week) and do our last lunch out (more than once).

We are now getting ready to fold our tent and hit the road. We have 25 cardboard boxes, 3 large Rubbermaid totes and a myriad of other stuff to stash in between all this containers. Our van will be loaded to the roof as always. We are leaving here on Thursday and will be home in Ontario by the 24th. We are making a stop in Denver and again in Guthrie Center, Iowa to visit with some friends. We will travel approximately 2800 miles in seven days. My rear will be quite square by the time I finally get out of the van!!

On the stitching front, I did make some progress between packing boxes and all the other things that happened this past week.

I finished this large motif on page 6. I stayed up until midnight to get it done and rewarded myself by staying up even longer to do the small motif and the little elephant as my reward.

Here is my ornament for April - Partidge and Pear by Prairie Schooler from the Just Cross Stitch Ornament magazine 2005. I ended up doing two because a friend is a partridge collector and just had to have one. I will give it to her once I make it into an ornament.

I am amazed that I have managed to stick with an ornament a month to this date.

I am also working on my Swedish weaving afghan and will share a photo next time. My stitching bag will travel with me in the car and I hope to get some things done as we venture down the road.

I will probably not blog again until we get home. Internet on the road is always iffy.

I will leave you with a couple of photos that I took this week of the cactus in bloom. We don't often see blooms. You need an extra amount of rain for this to happen. I think this is the second time in 6 years we have seen so many in bloom.

See you back in Canada.