The deadline for the next Cotton Robin turn around is fast approaching & I am still waiting for my project to arrive. Yes, yes it is possible it will hit my mailbox tomorrow afternoon. Maybe not. Back in....I want to say December but I might be wrong, the Robin Ringmaster polled everyone & said "are you sure?" & everyone said "you betcha - I have time for this over the next four to five months". & not long after two people dropped out.
I don' t mean to be unsympathetic. It is more than possible two people were visited by unforeseen tragedy. Ten, no make that fifteen years ago I would have accepted this without question. More or less without question anyhow. Now of course I have a ringside seat to why people drop in, drop out & generally get pissy when others do not rearrange their own lives to accommodate what is all too often a minor concern (yes there is the occasional cancer scare or stroke-both of these have actually happened but mostly it's "oh that was this month?"). I have also ranted a-plenty about students who think professors are sitting at their desks waiting like empty hand puppets for some bright young thing to walk through the door & engage them. Aren't you glad I am not in charge of the next generation's education?
I should back up & say this year's exam season was a breeze compared to previous years. My guess is this newish policy of linking students' current grades to whether or not their bright futures scholarships continue for the next semester/year has resulted in a much more alert classroom. Yes, there are still breakdowns: the crying jags, the dead grandmothers, the roommates who plot against them, but the easy-going slackers who used to take the short term F until they could repeat the class are gone. What we never realized was how much of the problem those easy going slackers were: the calls, the meetings, the parents. It was quite the time-drain.
So I have built up quite the head of steam & have no place to release it except the Cotton Robin. Or the Facebook Quilt Block Swap, but I am already barely touching base with many of these people. I have been so absent, the other group admin is now getting the fun questions like "how many inches in a yard?" I was not meaning to stick her with this crap but I guess I don't mind someone else knowing what backstage looks like.
Which brings us to this week-end. I had hoped to be sorting at least SOME of the quilt blocks due this coming Saturday, but as you may have guessed almost none of them have arrived. So I dug out an overgrown garden, moved some ginger varieties to a new location (we now have a shade garden in the front yard, not what I was going for but I could not bear to take out the volunteer oak three years ago & now it is rather grand). We road tested a few zero-turn mowers & in the end A decided to spend the bulk of a day fixing the old one which was just fine with me; I was not looking forward to learning a whole new style of driving.
On the other hand, a semi-pointless ride-along was probably just the thing for the mood I am in.
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