Miscellany

Last night I attended my first ever quilt guild meeting. I was anticipating that I would come home inspired and ready to create. Instead the meeting filled me with an uneasiness that was quite unpleasant. The guild is quite a large guild and it was quite obvious from the onset that there are two warring factions in this guild. It was definitely quite unpleasant. The highlight of the evening was meeting and speaking with Rosemary Eichorn http://www.sewjourn.com/. She was the guest speaker and I thoroughly enjoyed seeing her creative works and speaking with her. In addition there was a show and tell of quilts from the members. That, too, was enjoyable. I'm not sure that I'll go back, but my newly acquired neighborhood quilting buddies may invite me again and if so, I'll probably attend.

Tomorrow is B's birthday. He thinks I've forgotten (I did that one year - my bad), but I haven't. Tomorrow will be HIS day. Unfortunately for a good chunk of the day, I have to work. Ugh!

I have started on the quilt I plan to enter in the Houston International Quilt Festival. I hope to make a large dent in it this weekend. In addition, I'm still working on my "practice" quilt and I'm loving it. I am using my drawing doodles and transferring them to muslin that I've loaded onto my longarm machine. I am doing the doodles in a variegated brown thread and the filler is done in cream. It looks great. In hindsight, I would have chosen a color other than variegated brown for the doodling, but I'm still quite pleased.

I had to discuss my "performance development plan" with my boss today. I'm not big on setting and objectifying goals. I am and always have been a person who needs very little direction. I know what needs to be done and when it needs to be done so putting my goals down on paper seems frivolous to me. In the past we have been able to use very broad goals, but the new guy that my boss reports to wants us to have goals that can be quantified and at the end of the year we can say if we met our goals or not. So, one of my goals this year is to get my problem employee to "straighten up and fly right". Yeah, I'm liking that goal. NOT. I think everyone should be responsible and know what to do. We are all professionals, but I have someone who just isn't getting the picture. Unfortunately it's now my responsibility to make this person a more productive employee and if I don't succeed, then I haven't met my goal and therefore my bonus is affected??? I think NOT!!! But, it's not up to me, is it?! So far, I'm not liking the new guy much and for many and varied reasons. We'll see what happens March 15 (bonus day) and then I'll have a better idea. This man hasn't even been with the company a year and he's in charge of my bonus. He doesn't even act like I exist. Heavy sigh. He's a talker, not a doer. Blah, blah.

More rain today therefore my exercise took place on the treadmill tonight . . . boring!!!