Be careful what you whine about!

Today has been quite a day. Early in the day, I whined to the DH that I didn't have anything to blog about. Well, here's what whining got me:

Almost de-cluttered.

Haven't started de-cluttering, yet.

When I woke, I had a rip-snorting sinus headache that really set me off. Figuring that most of the issue was dust and dry air, I set about dusting the office. No real issue there, but that started me in on de-cluttering the piles of general "stuff" that accumulated on the desk and table. The stuff included yarn and knitting stuff, un-mail (a.k.a. junk mail), quilt patterns, turbo tax cd, thread cards, guild stuff (wrote a bunch of receipts for the May workshop), Christmas bows, fingerless mittens (thanks Joyce!), magazines, and I don't know what-all. As you see, the table is making progress. No promises about the desk, though.

After some culling.

Filing the magazines is what really did me in. Since the Love of Quilting box was full, I pulled out the oldest ones to look through, saved patterns I liked, and cut out Quilting the Quilt articles I wanted to keep. Good. The next box was the Quilting Quickly box. Oh yes, I thought, I need to cancel that one. Do you think that was easy? Of course not. After I heard "We can't do that from here" from 3 different people WHO WORK FOR THE QUILTING QUICKLY PUBLISHER, I was fit to be tied. Finally a 4th person was able to figure it out. Cancellation done.

This is now my collection of Quilty

THEN I tried to cancel another F&P publication, Quilty. Well the next 2 people tried to refer me to the phone number for the other one. The person at the phone number LISTED IN THE QUILTY MAGAZINE, said "No one alive here can cancel it." Well, that just made me livid!


The DH, seeing that I was about to have a breakdown, put me out of my misery. He called one of the executives listed in the magazine. Somebody at headquarters was going to know about this. So I talked to her and told her my tale of woe.

When she asked what magazine I was having trouble with, and I told her Quilty magazine, she said "Oh, we stopped publishing that a year ago."  Boy, did I feel like a dolt. Sure enough, the last issue I had was Jan/Feb 2015. "Embarrassed" isn't a strong enough word. In addition, during my quest, I had discovered that 2 of the F&P related websites had no way to logon to my account - just no place to enter a userid and password. So since I had her on the phone, I told her about that too. She had no clue about that, but offered "Maybe you are automatically logged in." .... Yup. Another dolt moment.

From my many years at IBM, I know something about really good executives. They may not  know much, but they know how to ask really good questions.

News from the Studio

Yesterday, I finished one of Kay's quilts. She is what I call a "free-spirit designer". She starts with a piece of fabric and just puts pieces together until she gets a block or quilt that she likes. She is wonderful at fabric selection and all of her quilts are just delightful. I used the Bolero pantograph. It's modern flowing design is just perfect for her contemporary, free-spirit quilt.

Learning for the Week

Never try to cancel a magazine that is no longer published.


 Now, let's all stop whining and go quilt something!