Two years ago, I attended the event in Savannah.  Had a BLAST!  Immediately put QuiltCon 2019 in Nashville on my calendar. I had a good time and met some nice folks, but I left without the warm fuzzies that I did in Savannah.

Why?

1. Downtown Nashville is very crowded.
2. Parking was expensive.
3. Conference hotel prices were outrageous.
4. Food vendors were confined to one small space where the dining seating (roped off to boot) also served as the seating for the demo stage.  I had to eat my lunch sitting on the floor of the loading dock.  Not cool.
5. Unless you sported vibrantly colored hair, nose rings, full sleeve tattoos and a hipster vibe, some of the vendors weren’t that interested in you. I saw more than one customer leave an armload of merchandise in a booth because they grew tired of waiting for someone to take their money. Apparently Instagram followers are more important than paying customers. 
6. There was no communication at all from QuiltCon or the instructor regarding a required kit fee for one class.  This caught several class attendees by surprise, many of whom don’t carry cash.  We had to pay the kit fee at the door before we entered the classroom. Why wasn’t the kit fee included in the class fee?
7. Dear instructors: please remember your students paid money to learn and sew- not listen to you constantly pitch the various products you sell, represent, or serve as a brand ambassador for during the entire class.  Once, maybe twice, is more than enough.

Remember the oxygen mask instructions given before each flight by the flight attendant? “Put YOUR mask on FIRST – then help the person next you.”

Honestly, mid-winter break came at the right time.

I’ve been feeling out-of-sorts for the past 3 weeks.  Tired, cranky and ever so grateful for our pseudo-snow day.  That gave me a very much needed one day off to regroup and make it until mid-winter break. My applied linguistics class has an insane amount of homework and I’ve had one hell of a time making any meaningful connections with the required IPA transcription activities to my daily library work. Thankfully, it’s about over.

In the day job, we’ve had some professional development sessions designed to help us better understand ourselves and our students.  Teachers tend to be very selfless and giving, but we have to learn to be selfish and put ourselves first or we’re not going to be any good for anybody.  My school work environment meets the training leader’s definition of “a trauma environment.”  Hmmm. Think that might be one of the reasons so many people leave each year?

After 48 hours of wholesome food, proper hydration, vitamins & supplements, sleep/naps and mega time spent reading, I FINALLY feel good again.  Message received!!! I have to slow down. set boundaries and take better care of me. 

Oh, and quilt!

And did I miss the memo?

At Saturday’s Kid’s Club, Miss Jackie and I compared notes on how crazy the past two weeks had been. She even asked if there had been a full moon. (I checked. Nope, it was a new moon moving into a quarter moon!) Saturday’s Kid’s Club involved the girls learning how to make chenille.  Lots of fuzzy fun!

Sometimes the SHTF in all areas of your life about the same time. That was me last week. Too much of everything – work, linguistics class, home and then a text from a customer asking if her orders were ready (no due date had been previously communicated).  I will just say that I made it through the work craziness and spent 14 hours of my precious weekend devoted to linguistics class assignments.  A brief reprieve was spent teaching the kid’s sewing class and purchasing backing fabric for two of my customer’s projects. (I also now have a deadline, but will not be able to complete all projects in her desired time frame.)

There were some pretty dark moments in the past week – like when the professor suddenly changed the assignment requirements and I thought I had no choice but to drop the class because there was no way I could redo my work at this late stage or the unsolicited “reality check” (courtesy of  my spouse) when I mentioned that I might want to leave teaching at the end of the year.  I also felt as if I’d let my customer down because I didn’t ask some hard questions on the front end when a seemingly small project morphed into something much, much larger, thus requiring substantially more time needed to complete her projects.

Linguistics class assignments are submitted, lesson plans written and now I’m heading downstairs to my happy place for a couple of hours before it’s light’s out and we welcome the craziness of the Block B schedule at work. Thank goodness February break and QuiltCon are right around the corner!

Peace!