Running update + Extreme Patchworking

I signed up for a 5K/10K Turkey Trot after finishing the half marathon a month ago. My thoughts at that moment: "10K? Pfffffffft - piece of cake."

And now the Turkey Trot is tomorrow and I'm thinking I'll run the 5K and then go to my mom's and have four desserts.

My thinking is this: most people in the US probably don't do ANY exercise on Thanksgiving, so I'm, like, ahead of the game. You know, even though I'm cutting my distance in half and having twice as many desserts.

Yes, your math is correct. I normally have at least two desserts on Thanksgiving, because duh, it is Thanksgiving. Oh, and I drink beers.

But whatever, it's the Turkey Trot's fault because they don't make you sign up for a 5K OR a 10K, you just sign up as a stupid general participant and then apparently decide how far you feel like running when you get there in your stretchy pants and long sleeves in the 40 degree weather and your mom (who is the best cook ever) has beers and a trough of mashed potatoes waiting on the other end.

Who, I ask you, would be, like, "Yes, I will forgo my Thanksgiving feast of beers by another half hour" when they (me) could just as easily be like, "I will just slam my way through the 5K and be on my way to drunken mashed potato eating in half an hour" instead.

WHO I ASK YOU? No one, that's who.

So, I will be running a 5k tomorrow morning (or trotting, as the race name indicates) and then hauling my ass (and Bubba and dog) to my folks' for some madcap mashed potato and pie eating with the small comfort that I just ran a race and can afford the extra one million calories.

And then maybe we arrive back home and the final pieces to the Extreme Patchworking Project will have arrived and I will be able to close the book on this Extremely unnecessarily complicated project.

See, when I finished with the project before, I was apparently also a little heavy in the Crazy department because I thought that I would make it extra special (and then also Extra Complicated) by going beyond the pattern and making it Useful as well as Finished. Two things that do not always coincide in my world of Just Getting the Fucking Thing Done.

The issue with this project was that, while cute, this bag was essentially useless to me as a purse and I couldn't really conceive of passing it off as a gift unless I could demonstrate its usefulness somehow.

So I consulted Bubba by holding the purse up at eye level and asking him what HE thought I should do. His idea was to take it to the grocery store and use it as a bread bag. Size-wise this makes sense, but insisting that Already Bitchy Safeway Cashier put my bread into the proprietary bag is about *thismuch* guaranteeing that the bread will be a smooshed useless wad rather than the perfectly packaged loaf of Bubba's dreams.

However, when re-evaluating the bag for potential usefulness, by holding it up to my own eye level and asking the question, "What size thing fits in here?", the answer came pretty fast: Knitting needles.

Like those big long annoying-because-they-don't-fit-any-of-my-needle-cases needles that you want to use but can't take anywhere because of their annoyingly long size that I keep talking about. But now there is a bag for just such annoying things. A bag that will let you take a project and a pattern AND the annoyingly ass long needles all at the same time and in a very patchworky fun way.

Oh and what if there was a matching patchworky needle case for the bag that would hold the long ass annoying needles? YES. We are there.

There = Finished and Newly Useful Extreme Patchwork Bag


So yes, it is finally done. Albeit not in the ultra supermost neato way I was originally imagining (there were secret pockets and fold out this and thats, etc), but in a way where I can give it as a gift without that someone looking at me with that, "Hey thanks for this thing I don't know what it is" look. Which I do get sometimes with my handicrafts.

So, someone, if you get this as a gift, now you know what it is and please don't look at me like that because I'll cry.

Happy Turkey!