Slow progress & surprises...

I'm trying to wait patiently for flooring to appear in our patio room. I've picked out the tile and am waiting for hubby to talk to the installer. Plus there is the little detail about actually ordering the tile. Hubby is off on Thursday and will probably place the order then. It's supposed to take a week to come in. Let's see, one week from Thursday is Thanksgiving. Oh, no! Holidays always mean shipment delays. At this point, it may be mid-December before the floor is in place and we can finally start using the room.

That's Boo looking out the new door and Pookie laying down on the rug. The tile near the bottom is what I've chosen for the floor. It's a nice warm color and will go nicely with the ceiling fan. The darker color should absorb more heat from the sun this winter when the angle of the sun is lower. It also shouldn't show every footprint. I chose a darker color since everything else in the room is white. If I had chosen a light flooring, you probably would need sunglasses!

Hubby has been busy painting all the drywall repairs we had fixed recently. The holes were from previous remodeling projects. Here's a picture of how nice our pass through window now looks from the kitchen to the family room. All it needs is a board or tile at the bottom to be complete. It's so nice not to have holes in my walls anymore. Once gardening season is totally over, hubby promises to start knocking out some of the other home projects.

There's not much left to do in the garden. We harvested the last of the potatoes yesterday. Between mice damage and the weather, most of the potatoes are in the small to tiny range. Oh well, lots of them will become seed potatoes for next year.

Still to harvest are the brussels sprouts and carrots. It's time to put the garden to bed for the winter. The trees have lost most of their leaves and color. I enjoyed the colorful display for the short time it was here. Here's the odd coloration that lots of leaves had this year. Gorgeous, isn't it?

I have a lot of pattern designs in the works. More than a few are waiting to be test knit or crocheted. I've started a pattern testing group on Yahoo to make it easier to share these patterns with my testers. There are some fun ones that should be released soon.

At the end of October I received an unexpected and thrilling phone call out of the blue from a book publisher. How exciting! An editor had seen my blog and patterns and approached me about working on a knitting book for them. I'm very flattered and honored to have been considered for this opportunity. Very few publishers contact potential authors about writing books for them.

I did a lot of thinking about the offer for almost a week. (I didn't think of much else during that period! LOL!) I carefully weighed the pros and cons. I am familiar with how much work goes into writing a book. I've worked with a number of authors typing, formatting manuscripts, creating indexes, etc., and also on the production and editorial side for two different publishers. It's an incredible amount of work. Most books don't make much beyond the initial small advance on royalties. You have to love what you're doing.

The book would not have been totally about my own designs. Yes, some of them would have been included. The publisher had a specific concept in mind for the book's theme and structure. Laying out the tasks that would be involved to complete this book, I began to see that taking on this project would become a full time job to do it well. Dealing with multiple designers and hunting down the patterns to include in the book itself would be an incredible task.

Then I thought what would happen to my designing, knitting, and personal life, while I was working on this book over the next eight months? Would there be any time or energy left for anything else? This is a big concern. Life is about balancing what you have to do with what you want to do. Too much work and you burn out.

After careful consideration of the workload, the time commitment, the advance, and having to sign away the rights to about a dozen of my designs, I decided to turn it down.

I'm happy having time to design and knit without any deadlines other than the ones I set for myself. I've never been interested in being rich or famous. :)