Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, everyone!

I hope your holiday is filled with all of your favorite things!

Favorite Things

You know the song: Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens / Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens / Brown paper packages tied up with strings / These are a few of my favorite things

Of course, this package isn't actually brown paper, and it's not tied up with strings, but it IS ready to go to the post office, and THAT makes it one of my favorite things!

And what, you might ask, is in the box?  Tami's saddle!

I'm so excited that it's finally done and ready to ship! It feels like it's been a long, long project but a very enjoyable one.

My finals (and class!) are over and I'm just waiting to see what my final grades are.  Thanks for the well wishes, everyone!  My Christmas spirit is in full swing and I'm loving the holiday season.  All we need is snow to make it perfect.

I still have plans to wrap up the saddle tutorial before the end of the year and would like to get a blog post out on my short cuts (I even took some pictures for it today!) but it is the holiday season: I have various Christmas activities at church and with family for a lot of the next two weeks.

Just in case I don't make it back to the blog until after the holiday: Merry Christmas, everyone!

Two Sizes Too Small

"Now, please don't ask why; no one quite knows the reason. It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight. Or it could be that his head wasn't screwed on just right. But I think that the most likely reason of all... may have been that his heart was two sizes too small."

I'm not sure if it's my shoes, my head, or what but my Christmas spirit has definitely been a few sizes too small this holiday season.  We are a scant two and a half weeks away from Christmas and I'm just not feeling it.  I have lots of Christmas music on my iPhone, but the only thing I can stand to listen to is "You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch," which I purchased last night.  Everything else is terribly annoying, and is it just me or are they playing all of the holiday favorites far too early in the season?  I was attempting to take a late evening nap the other day and was so close to asleep when "MERRY CHRISTMAS, CHARLIE BROWN!" woke me right up.

I think a deciding factor in my lack of holiday merriment is class.  The last few weeks have been a frenzy of paper writing, quiz taking, and finals-panicking, intensified by a sketchy professor who seems to have difficulty with technology (shouldn't familiarity with email and computers be a requirement for teaching an online class?!).  I took the first final last night, and it was the test from hell.  I was anticipating a test like the midterm: multiple choice, fairly easy, so I started at 9:30pm.  What I got was 20 essay questions, each of which could easily have made a two or three page paper, and a frustrated, tearful 2am bedtime.  Hopefully the other two will be a little easier on me, but I was expecting that particular final to be one of the easiest.  My confidence has taken a beating.

Due to this flurry of activity, absolutely nothing has happened in the studio.  The instant finals are over, I'll print Tami's saddle pad and ship her saddle out.  After that, I'd like to start on a very special project and experiment with auctioning it off, but we'll see how that goes.  I still have to enroll for next semester!

Hopefully I'll be posting more after this weekend; we'll have a house full of guests on Saturday, but I should be done with class by then and from there? All I have is my part time job.  Words cannot describe how sweet that will be.

Well, off to the next final! One chance, 100 questions, 90 minutes.  Pray for me.