Incoherent Scribblings

Happy New Year! It has been a busy time for me and after a much needed break, the SBQ is up and ready to go today. So, without further ado the first SBQ of 2007 is:

Do you dream of running your own LNS/ONS? If so, tell us about your dream. If not, tell us about your cross stitch dream… maybe you dream of designing, dyeing your own floss or fabric, etc.

Why yes, I do! This question came to me after chatting with another stitcher and realizing that I am apparently not the only stitcher out there with this crazy dream.

Ideally, I would like to run a small LNS/ONS combined with bookstore and an Internet surfing area in order to touch on all of my three favorite hobbies, but I am not sure how well such a combination would work. If I decided to run a strictly cross stitch shop I would probably do most of my business online, but I wouldn’t want to run an online-only business because I am always looking for a place to go where I can physically browse through stitching supplies.

In my present area, there seem to be quilting shops in nearly every small town, but I have yet to find a cross stitch shop and I would love to be the place where people can come and find not only charts and DMC, but fabric, beads, and specialty threads as well.

Unfortunately though, I don’t have much of a head for business so I imagine my little shop will never amount to anything more than a dream.

For those of you who might be wondering… yes, I have a new guy.

I first met him the summer I was 14 and he was 20. He was a lifeguard at our local swimming pool and though I thought he was cute, it was my best friend who had the crush on him.

After all these years I remembered him though. After all, my best friend and I spent many hours prancing around in front of him that summer because it was the first year that we really filled out our bikinis. So needless to say, nearly nineteen years later he just so happened to remember me too.

Nowadays my sister works with him and a couple of months ago she started filling me in on what a rough year he had been having. In many ways his situation paralleled my own and though I wasn’t sure either one of us was really ready for any kind of romantic interlude, it seemed to me that we could both use a friend.

It started with dinner, a movie, and lots of conversation: Everything about how he remembered me in that itsy bitsy teeny weeny yellow polka-dot bikini (yes, my first bikini really was yellow polka-dotted) to my travels overseas to his brief stint as an exterminator. I told him of my plans and that my stay in Small Town, Iowa was intended to be a brief one.

Nevertheless, the next week we went out to dinner again and that time we went bowling afterwards. Then later in the week I learned that he played Cribbage, one of my all-time favorite card games, and next thing I knew we were playing Cribbage nearly every evening and I was eating dinner with his family on Sunday.

I keep reminding him of my plans and we agreed that we would enjoy the time we have together one day at a time, but I know that each time he tells me about his dream of life with a white picket fence that he hopes that one day I will change my mind and offer to stay with him and live happily ever after.

And never has his wish been so apparent than the other night as a look of sadness and disappointment flashed across his face when I told him that in a couple of weeks I will be going on an interview 500 miles away and with any luck, I will be leaving by the beginning of March.