OOPS!!

Last night, Darla called to tell me that I owed her $700 in telephone calls. Oops! Darla graciously allows us to be on her cell phone account, and I'd checked with her concerning free long distance calls from Guam. Yes, she had free long distance, etc, etc. So, Dad and I had leisurely phone conversations as I watched geckos scurry along Marie's walls, Joan and I discussed quilts, etc. from the Honolulu Airport; Darla kept me royally entertained with Vale stories during my long layovers....Oops! Now, I have a debt to repay and our long-planned kitchen counter replacement project will have to be postponed.
I've been thinking about the Oopses that sometimes seem to pepper our lives. Although most of them aren't serious, many of our blunders affect our temperament for the day, our pocketbook, perhaps our friendships. Here are a few of my Oopses of late:
In a recent blog post, I stated that Spring had come to the Gorge. Almost every day since that post, it's snowed!! It's a piddling snow, a kind of I-didn't-really-want-to-do-this, but...kind of snow that blankets the earth but isn't serious enough to cause any problems for motorists or serious walkers. Frankly, we need the moisture of the snow, so we aren't faced with a summer of drought as we've had in the past.

Another Oops is the gorgeous poinsettias that filled our house at Christmas time. Vale bought me some Water Globes as a Christmas gift to help with the watering of the plants in the house, but the poinsettias dwindled down and down and and finally gave up the ghost when I abandoned them for the sunny climes of Guam and forgot to fill the globes. I should have taken them with me!!

In the same blog in which I mentioned springtime in the Gorge, I included a picture of the Gorge. Dad pointed out to me that the picture I posted is actually the view from Grandma Kennedy's house in Bremerton! Oops! If you look closely at the picture of Grandma and me on that blog, you'll see the same view out the window. So here are some pictures of the real Gorge in all its springtime brown-ness!!

I'm still working on Ethan's quilt. Quilting is, at its worst, a tedious business. Ethan's quilt is called a pieced quilt, in which hundreds of pieces, large and small, are sewn together to make the whole. Ethan's quilt is composed of hundreds of rectangles. The rectangles are 4.5" x 2.5." Once I sew the rectangles together, I have to "square up" the rows. I'm not sure my picture's clear enough, but, hopefully, you can see that I got a little carried away with my "squaring up!" Another Oops!

I have plenty of fabric, so I can replace these shortened rectangles and go on, but in the era of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, fabric was very dear and hard to acquire, so such an Oops could have spelled disaster for a quilter. Most quilters call such mistakes as these--creative opportunities and find a way to re-design the quilt to hide the goof and go on!

When these Oopses stop me for brief times, I am reminded of my father's favorite saying: the AA motto called the Serenity Prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. It is an imperative in one's life not to allow the Oopses to be blown up out of proportion and to become the means of paralyzing or ruining one's perspective.

Taking out some Oops stitches, Love, Mom

I've learned.. That everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you're climbing it. Andy Rooney