As many of you know, I am engaged in a big genealogy project of my own making: the goal is to get everything I know about the ancestry of each of my four grandparents into a written and illustrated booklet and into my kids’ hands. I figured it would take me two months to complete one grandparent’s book, so the overall project would be, allowing for slight variations of time available to do this, done in a year’s time. I finished up my Grandma Maud Susan McConnell Dobbins’s family in two months. I finished up my Grandma Jessie Davis Ryland’s family in two months. I’m now working on my Grandpa Byrd Ryland’s family and I may need to use a little bit of that built-in variation time for him, because his two month period spans both Thanksgiving and Christmas, never a good time to find oneself at a loss for something to do. Anyway, I’m still on schedule as of this writing.
This morning I was at the Laundromat knitting furiously while the machines did their work and I was thinking about when this knit-hat project was going to be done. The hat I made for Olivia didn’t fit well, so I’m knitting another one. It needs to be done by Saturday, because that’s when I’ll see her next. I thought to myself, “Projects, projects, projects!”
Lurking in the back of my mind is an unfinished cross-stitch piece that I set aside some time back and just haven’t returned to finish it. I thought how unlike me to not finish a project. And at that point I felt my nose growing longer and my tongue turning black, both signs of a big, fat lie. And once I acknowledged to myself that I had more than one unfinished project, my mind’s eye remembered what was in one of my office drawers. In addition to the three unfinished cross-stitch pieces I’m showing, I found two that hadn’t even been started yet, and found four that I had started but didn’t like and know I’ll never get back to them. Those four are now residing in my trash can.
And because I DO know that I will keep doing the cross-stitches I dare not throw away all the threads that I’ve collected over the years. I started putting them into nice little cubby-holed boxes but finally rather than buy MORE boxes I decided to chuff them in zip-lock bags. That quantity of possibly usable embroidery threads takes up a great deal of space; I am not able to let even 1 of them go!
I do hate to have unfinished projects hanging around. Whenever I used to go housesit for Kerry I always took a bunch of projects with me. I never knew what I would feel like working on. “Feeling” is not a good rationale for completing projects. But if I assign myself too many deadlines for completing things, I feel that I don’t have time to smell the roses.
I am definitely not going to buy any more pieces to cross-stitch, nor am I going to do any more hats once Olivia’s gets finished. I AM going to make a little something for the newest Great-granddaughter, but I think I’ll draw the line there. One by one I’ll finish the projects I’ve started, finish up Grandpa Scott Dobbins’ family report by February 2010, and just maybe do nothing for a while except read. And smell a few flowers, too.
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