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the die is cast

Thursday night I went online and submitted a form and printed out a receipt. I am now officially registered to enter a quilt in the state fair, and it is due at the fairgrounds no later than 5pm Oct.9.

And as I finish typing that sentence, I feel like I am back in a dorm room at Free Will Baptist Bible College my freshman year, and Charity Van Winkle has walked in the door to see how I've finished my Ancient History timeline that is due the next day. She had been working on it for WEEKS, and I had no clue we even had such a project. She looked at me strangely, and informed me it was on the syllabus. I remembered getting one of those the first day of class, and it simply looked like a class outline. Silly me didn't realize that it actually listed assignments and due dates on it.  I stayed up almost all night working on that project, and I was quite pleased with my C, and no one other than Charity knew it was a last minute frenzied free-for-all. The next day after classes she drove me to Target (I didn't own a car) and helped me pick out something called a "planner". When we got back to campus, she stopped in my room and showed me hers, and how to list everything from every syllabus AND to backtrack several weeks and write in when to start working on it. At the time I thought it was just another bump in life, but four years later I was still using that method to keep up with things. And for the most part, it worked.

And unlike those days, I actually have STARTED this quilt. I've even scheduled an appointment at the shop that rents the long arm quilting machines. That appointment is this coming Thursday. I estimate I'm about 2/3 finished with the top, and I have a few hours tomorrow and half the day Monday and Tuesday reserved to work on it. So there's no turning back. No more thinking about patterns and colors and ideas. It's now do or die. Okay. So it's really not THAT severe. If I don't finish it'll just mean they'll have an extra spot reserved for a quilt that doesn't show up.

I will probably always be one of those people rushing to meet a deadline. It seems to be how I'm wired. I think the day I actually have a project complete more than a day ahead of its due date might very well be the day the earth stops spinning on its axis. Or else it will make my "do it immediately the second you know about it" husband have a heart attack.

So if you don't hear from me much the next two weeks, you'll know why. And with that, I'm off to applique a catfish.

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