I was thrilled to get a positive reply from Cindy this morning.  She is going to be able to quilt one of my holiday gifts, which is quite a load off of me.  And then it turned out that Marcie had the perfect backing for it, so I am in good shape!  While I was at Marcie's picking up the fabric, a package from her daughter arrived.  It not only included some wonderful artwork from her grandson (to cheer her up) but also some ghost peppers from their garden.  I appropriated ONE, and it will go to Alex as one of his Chanukah gifts (don't tell him!) since Tom and I certainly have no use for it!

At Cindy's I approved the thread color she suggested, and the quilting pattern - and she's going to piece the backing for me - so I'm definitely a happy camper.  Also got to see a stunning quilt of Brenda's on the frame.  It's paper-pieced, and took her three years - but is absolutely gorgeous.

After the post office to mail some checks I hit the grocery store.  The most critical thing on the list was eggs (I did get them hard-boiled this afternoon, and will devil them tomorrow to bring to Wednesday's potluck at Foothills) but of course had many other items on the list.  The store was buzzing - lots of people already doing their Thanksgiving shopping.  And in fact I did pick our turkey (and finally scored a turkey baster for the hot tub.)

Bumped into Mimi there, which is when I discovered that she's no longer teaching, and has started quilting.  We had a lovely chat in the middle of the aisle (despite living on the same street we rarely see each other), and I may even have talked her into joining us for the quilt program on Wednesday.

There were some serious lines at the checkout, and when I noticed that the woman behind me had just one item (!) I insisted she pop ahead of me.  The woman in front of me had just started unloading her fairly full cart and had her back to me, but when I asked her if the woman with just one item could go before her of course she agreed.  Turned out the woman with just a bottle of juice had recently moved to Arizona, and I was glad we could show her how nice people here are.  

We probably saved her half an hour, because when the cashier rang up the total for the woman in front of me it was much more than she expected.  She looked at the screen, and asked what had rung up for $50.  Turned out the cashier had rung up a $5 item incorrectly (not sure how she managed that since everything is scanned) but of course she needed the manager to over-ride the redo, and that took some time.

This afternoon Marcie brought over the 2nd quilt for me to bind (it's a big one, over 400 inches!) so tonight I decided I'd better get started binding the smaller one.  Got part of one side done when my phone rang.  It was Rachelle, saying she'd "heard the good news."  I hadn't yet sent her an e-mail about getting together for lunch in December after making my plane reservations this morning, so figured she must have heard from Mom.  Rachelle and I were several minutes into our conversation when we realized that the news she was referring to was the Arizona senate race (which had just been decided for Sinema an hour earlier) and not my visit (about which she had no idea.)  We'll be laughing about that for some time to come.

It was COLD today.  I was dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans, and socks.  Tom had on a hoodie.  You'd think it was winter.  He suggested we turn on the heater tonight... so we did!