And The Storm Rolled In...

Phoenix was hit by a massive dust storm last night.  My side of the Valley didn't get hit as bad as other parts, but I still had some cleanup to do this morning for the pool.  I don't think the sides are supposed to be brown lol.  The solar blanket was also covered in dirt so that needed to be hosed off too.  The good news is that the temperatures dropped quite a bit due to the storm so that is a welcome relief, although it is a humid out - 73% humidity according to accuweather.com.  That's pretty high for us.  Hope we get some of that rain they are predicting for later in the day.  We sure could use it.

In Limbo

For the past couple of months I have felt like I have been living a double life.  I have made two separate ten day trips to North Dakota in the past 60 days and am going to be making another two week trip this month.  That is more traveling than I normally do in a year and it's not done yet.  I have another trip in September and yet another in October.  While I'm there I try to keep up with work via remote access, but stuff related to the house has to wait and I usually come home to nice surprises, like crunchy brown grass because the pet sitter didn't happen to notice that it was changing from green to brown because the irrigation system died while I was gone.

You are probably wondering why I am doing so much traveling right now, other than the fact that it gets me out of the searing Arizona heat, which is great.  Anyway, the answer is that I have become involved with someone that lives in North Dakota, so we are currently enjoying a very long distance relationship.  Your next question is probably how I managed to get involved with someone so far away.  It's actually quite an interesting story, which I am happy to tell if you've got a few spare minutes.  Or twenty lol.

Way back in 1984, at the young age of 15, I met this great guy whom I will refer to as "S".  Mainly because his first name starts with S lol.  We started dating, long distance even then I might add, because he was away at college while I was still in high school.  My parents must have really liked him to allow me to date someone that much older than me.  We dated pretty seriously for over two years until I ended it during my senior year of high school.  It was an amicable split so we stayed friends and kept in touch.  We even kept in touch after I moved to AZ.  That is until he got married and his new wife made him cut off all contact with me.  That was in 1994. 

Fast forward to 2009 when I joined Facebook.  He was on there too so I sent him a friend request.  He accepted and we renewed our friendship and emailed from time to time.  He was divorced by then, but in a relationship.  By the time my divorce was final, the relationship that S had been in had also ended so we were both single for the first time in almost 20 years.  Long story short, we started having actual conversations via internet chat or the phone and realized that it felt like it had been a day since we'd last really talked instead of almost twenty years.  At that point we thought it would be worth it to see each other in person and see how it went.  So S flew down a few months ago and we basically just picked up where we had left off. 

It is nice to be in a real relationship for the first time in many years, but I have to say, it has really cut into my quilting time!  I had boatloads of time to quilt when I was married to someone who didn't want to spend any time with me.  So I'm not sure when I will be able to get back to quilting like I was, between being gone a lot and also looking at the likely prospect of a cross country move some time in the next twelve months.  Oh, and S has three great sons who I have been having a blast getting to know, both in person and chatting via Skype.  Definitely time well spent getting to know them.

So that's where I'm at right now.  Between the relationship, work, and keeping up the house and yard, I don't have time to even think about quilting, let alone do it.  After this next trip I am home for a couple of months and S will be coming my direction instead, so I'm hoping that means a bit more quilting time.  We'll see I guess lol.