Education Week - Day Two

The days are long and I couldn't stay awake as I tried to read a bit before turning the lights out last night.

I started the day off yesterday by taking a long walk. I made my 10,000 steps in the day and most of them were made on that walk. Thanks to Google Maps, I found I nice circuit around the hotel that took about 40 minutes of fast walking. If the circuit thing wasn't going to work, I would have gone out 20 minutes and then back 20 minutes. I felt great after the walk.

I see the temperature is below zero this morning, but I still plan to go out. Interesting about the temperature. It's minus 2 - the same temperature as back home, but back home that is also the high whereas here - the high is supposed to be 13. But I see we have a snowstorm forecast for Saturday the day after I get home. Oh darn! I was going to potentially pick up my new car, but not in a snowstorm.

Yes - I got the VIN yesterday so will pass that along to the insurance today. The Matrix rims do not fit on this car so have to buy winter tires so they can be installed. Buying a new car is an endless stream of revenue outflow!

I've been so good with eating while I'm away. We had sandwiches at lunch - I ate the filling of two of them and left the buns. It's not that I can't eat bread, but it such a filling thing and there's not much nutrition in a white bun except the calories which then turn to sugar. I didn't eat the cheese either. But I'm certainly not hungry, we did have a salad to go with it and there's fruit on the snack table and baby carrots in the fridge. I bought some hummus and cauliflower so that rounded out the day very nicely. I've been very diligent about drinking water. I'm going to float away soon!

Off to a BBQ place for dinner. Oh boy - what to have? I ended up with a burger and a salad. Didn't eat the bun. The meat could have been cooked a wee bit more but I ate it anyway. Then someone ordered the most amazing piece of carrot cake with warm cream cheese frosting. I did NOT touch one bite of it. Looked amazing, but I've made a decision that that kind of food is no longer in my diet. It wasn't that difficult to say no. I think about my lifestyle change and I know that is the right decision.

Being healthy and happy with different choices is more important to me than going home stuffed with BBQ ribs and carrot cake. Just like driving a smaller car is a choice I made and I'll be happy with it.

Now onto our day! Each of the groups that went out to different restaurants the previous night got up and talked about the topic that we discussed the night before. OK - so what would you want to have in a sewing machine was the topic. Well - some very creative ideas came up and some improvements came up. The best part - some of the folks from Sweden are here and we got to share our ideas with them.

Yes - if they decide to take any of the ideas into consideration, we realize that it'll take months or more likely years to make anything happen but it's nice to have that connection. Some of the ideas were amazing.

But I'm already so impressed by what the current top of the line machines do and I don't know the half of it. Gosh - I learned something so simple yesterday that I'm almost ashamed to admit it. I really need to sit at the machines and start poking all the buttons and touching stuff without even sewing.

Then we got to spend the day covering two new products that were introduced at Convention last fall. I was very happy about this. While I've had training on both the products, I had questions and I was able to get them answered. Now I need to digest that material and figure out how to portray that to potential customers. One was the Multi-Needle Embroidery machine - 10 needles. Thread it up, load the hoop and walk away. Come back and VOILA - embroidery is done!  The other is the fabric frame which allows one to load their quilt, or project and be able to work on it without moving the fabric.

That took up the entire day! It seems that we have no spare minutes as we often work through lunch or have a short lunch. I don't have a problem with that - there's so much to learn and I'm OK filling up the day. But my head is spinning.

Let's not forget the information to be gleaned from the other educators. Some of them have been sewing forever. Well - I have too, but I've been so focused on quilting that I don't necessarily use all the features of the sewing machine. It's time to step outside the box!

I see it's time to run downstairs to see if they have a banana. I didn't see any last night, but hopefully, they're stocked up for this morning. I love it - just popped downstairs and they have these almost too ripe to eat bananas. Perfect for my smoothie. I got two - one for today and one for tomorrow.

Here's an interesting thing happening in the craft world. This has to do with knitting. This lady knit a scarf showing the delays on her commute by train. It's kind of neat. I see other people are making temperature quilts which is a neat idea. Do a Google search on temperature quilts. It's quite the thing and there are loads of variations.

Have a super day!

Ciao!