Progress in stitching, scrapping, and being annoyed by my cats!

I finally took a photo of my sampler progress! She's certainly a colorful little thing:

Rachel was definitely a big fan of birds, and I'm having a good time stitching them. But what was she thinking with those bright turqoise feet??? They are quite odd. I'm going to get a good chunk of stitchy time next week. I can't decide whether to just focus on pushing through on this sampler, or if I should switch over to something new. Hmmm... guess we'll see what kind of mood I'm in when I assemble my 'to do' bag Friday after work.

Speaking of work, there are days when it is a challenge to make it to work bright eyed and well put together. Those days typically go something like this: "Crash!" I am startled from a blissful slumber an hour before my alarm is due to go off. I stumble into the living room, no cats are in sight, but I do see my ottomon...

How did they manage to flip the thing completely on its back?!?! Flash forward a bit later in the morning. I pulled my clothes out for the day as I was brushing my teeth and laid them out on my bed. I quickly finished in the bathroom and came back to find this:

I must GENTLY remove Princess from my suit and then roll it with a lint brush to remove her little furs. Sigh. And then I come home from work, and I find Lucky, looking like all he needs to finish his day is a good strong drink and the channel changer:

Darned cats.

I also found some time since my last post to make a little more progress on my Egyptian album. After touring Dendera in the morning, we returned to our boat and sailed back to Luxor. It was late afternoon when we docked, and we headed over to Luxor Temple:


The first large courtyard of the temple was full of statues of Ramses II, all of varying sizes. Our guide explained to us the significance of the posture the pharoah was posed in. I'll be darned if I can remember the meanings now, though. I'll have to see if I can dig that up somewhere. Anyway, on the second page of this layout, you see photos of 3 things: a mosque, a painting of Christian apostles, and the cartouche of Ramses (yes, I can 'read' that it says Ramses. At least something stuck in my head!). The Christians and the Muslims took over the ancient Egyptians' place of worship and converted it for their own use. I saw a couple of other places where crosses had been carved inside of temples at some of the other sites we visited.

As we were wandering around the temple, the sun eventually set completely. This is the only temple we saw in the complete dark. It was nice to escape the extreme heat... not that it was actually cool or anything. And it was fun to soak up some nighttime atmosphere within the temple walls. I thought it was absolutely gorgeous, all lit up against the night sky.


The row of sphinxes that you see at the bottom right of the second page of this layout are the other end of the avenue that began at Karnak Temple. That's a lot of statues all lined up!

Luxor certainly did not become less busy during the night. Since its so hot during the day, the local population becomes more active during the cooler evening hours. We drove from the temple to a papyrus store/museum. We watched a demonstration of the process of making papyrus sheets, and I ended up buying several beautiful, hand painted pieces of art there. I'm sure no one will be surprised to learn that the piece I bought for myself was of Bastet, the cat god. I still haven't gotten it framed, but it's sitting at my parents' house right now, so I can't take a photo of it to share tonight.

Well, that's all for now. I hope everyone is enjoying their summer so far, and finding plenty of time to exercise their creative muscles!