Plans Changed (Works in Progress No. 1, Vol 8)

Yesterday, I wrote my WIP post for Wednesday. All it needed was pictures. I've included the original post below just because--I wrote it, might as well put it out there since I put the time into doing it. =P I've been sick, so after writing the blog post, I'd curled up on the couch and dozed while answering questions the boys had on some of their school work--I've been having them work on subjects that they can do more independently since I got sick; we'll catch up on the subjects that require more of my attention once I start feeling better. It's days like this that I love how flexible our schedule is. So after my nap, I had planned on getting pictures, adding them to the post, then uploading the post. It should be pretty clear from where this is going, that getting pictures did not happen, and it wasn't just the pictures that didn't happen. With the way things are playing out, pretty much everything I wrote in the bulk of my post is now wrong. Gotta love when life does that to you, but in this case, I have no complaints, and here's why.

To start with, my nap ended up lasting into early afternoon, when I woke up to my cell phone. It was my real estate agent calling. If you recall from my Moving Update post back in early July, we had to move back into our old house. My husband has been dealing with a very long commute, and there have been a lot of days where I've had to travel with him (with all the kids in tow) because a lot of our life still functionally exists closer to where he works. This move was to be temporary, we hoped. We would stay in this house until it sold. I'll admit we haven't been overly optimistic. The house went up for sale in early June 2010. However, we got an offer on our house over the weekend, and yesterday, our agent had gotten in the official paperwork where the buyers accepted our counter-offer. So yesterday evening we spent with our agent going over and signing our half of that paperwork. The buyers are very enthusiastic, which is encouraging to me. They're having the house inspected today, which meant last night, we spent a lot of time cleaning things up. Technically, whether the house is clean from clutter or not should not really matter for an inspection, but there are two reasons why we were doing this: 1) Face it, a cleaner house will make a better impression on someone overall; it is my opinion that if the house is cluttered and messy, then the house does not look well cared for, and the inspector will be more likely to find things wrong with the house. 2) We found out from our agent that the buyers will be accompanying the inspector through the house; these are the people we want to keep happy so that they don't pull out, which they can do at any time in the next three weeks--technically four weeks, but after three weeks, we get to keep their earnest money if they do, which makes it less likely that they'll back out then.

Needless to say, at that point, thoughts of getting pictures for my blog were gone from my head. We've been stressing over trying to get things cleaned up here, which although they weren't bad, there was still clutter that comes from me having been sick over the last several days; I haven't been as on top of regular chores as I would normally be. Even this morning, there's still a lot of little things that I need to take care of. On top of that, to start clearing things out, we packed up and sent all the Halloween stuff and scrap fabric for my husband to take back to storage on his way to work this morning. Included with the Halloween stuff were both the Jack and Sally costumes, my Mae costume, and my Gothic Panda costume. It kind of makes it difficult to get pictures of costumes that I don't have access to anymore. XD With all the stuff going on with the house right now, me being sick (I am feeling a little better today, but not close to 100% yet), and art for Anime USA coming up, we decided that fixing the Jack and Sally costumes did not need to happen; we're not even going to bother with costumes at Anime USA this year. My goal now is to take things easier and hopefully get better soon, focus on keeping the house cleaned up--it's not sold yet, so there could still be showings, plus outside of the inspector coming today, there will also be an appraiser coming out at some point this month, and try and get that bookmark set I'd planned for AUSA done. Sadly most of those things aren't quite as fun as the projects I'd like to be working on, but sometimes the stuff life dishes up is more important. I think right now is one of those times.

Overall, I'm not going to complain. After almost a year and a half with this house for sale, we finally got an offer, and it was a reasonable offer. You have no idea how excited I am about this. I'm trying not to worry and stress too much about all the things that could go wrong between now and closing (Nov 28) because worry never helps anything really. If all goes smoothly, we will be moving again at the end of this month. I may hate moving, but this is one of those moves that will be a good thing in the long run.

It's that time of the week again, except this time I don't really have much new to post. I'm currently working on trying to be not sick anymore. I've had this nasty cold/flu thing for the last couple of days. About all I've been capable of is dragging myself out of bed just to curl up on the couch and go back to sleep. XD

However, I can post some not-so-great photos of the mostly-finished Jack and Sally costumes. I need to make some adjustments to the size and shape of Sally--only a little, it actually came out really close to what I needed, and considering I only spent maybe 4 hours on what you see in the pictures, I think that's excellent. I also need to go back and add the black stitching lines on her dress. If I'd really like to do things right, I'll also want to pick up a wig, but eh... that's low on my list of priorities right now. For Jack, I want to completely redo the collar thing and the cummerbund. Inspiration for the adding a cummerbund comes from the Disney character version that you can find walking around the parks this time of year. It's a good idea because honestly, with the proportions of the coat and the way pants fit normal people, the white shirt under the jacket will show around the waist. A black cummerbund neatly fixes that problem, except the one I put together last minute only sort of work and needs adjusting. The jacket needs some minor adjustments to the back--it puckers just a little where the tails connect to the main part of the coat; it's not super noticable, but I know it's there and it annoys me. I also didn't like how poofy the collar piece came out--only partly intentional. The only material I had on hand to try and fill it out was fiber fill stuffing. I'd like to take the stuffing out and replace it with floral wire or something along those lines--something much less poofy, but could still help the collar keep its shape. Of course, I'd also like to actually get snaps or something on the collar, since right now, it's just held on by safety pins. Now, I am technically planning on making at least most of these adjustments by Anime USA because I'd like to take these costumes there. Of course, my plans did not involve me getting sick for half a week, and new art for the art table will be taking priority over these costumes.