It's Raining!

Wow! We are having a for real and true rain tonight. Usually it does not rain here until November-December. It is kind of nice and cozy. I made chili for dinner, good ol' comfort food. I am generally a follow the recipe to the letter kind of girl. I think it is part of my accounting frame of mind. We just do not go outside of the rules. Anyway, I got wild and threw in a bunch of tomatoes that I needed to use up and some leftover flat beer that got put back in the fridge. Bob said it was delicious (Yay!) and congratulated me on going outside of the box.

I had that flu/fever thing this weekend. Yucka. My head was all achy and stuffy. I feel better now but that was no fun.

I have been working on my genealogy studies this weekend for my class. I am not sure if I have shared this or not, but about six years ago I started my search. It has been such an interesting journey. The side of my family that I have been able to trace the furthest is my mother's side all of the way back to Macclesfield, Cheshire, England. Macclesfield was the center of the silk industry until the Industrial Revolution, when many people immigrated from Macclesfield to Paterson, New Jersey to work in the burgeoning silk trade there. In my research I have found a long lineage of silk weavers, embroiderers, and silk trade laborers on this side of the family. I wonder there must be some sort of institutional memory that made me want to embroider and work with fine cloth like linen and silks. I love working with silk best and will use it in my stitching whenever possible.

I have such a sense of pride and connectedness to my ancestors in this journey. I think a big part of it is that our lives are not just woven together, but that they are also woven together by needle and thread. I am connected to them with a love for doing the same things that they did, only I get to do them for fun.