Thanks, Murphy. I appreciate it. Not.

Yep, it's been one of those days.

My "good" sewing machine has been throwing fits, so I finally decided to quit fighting with it and busted out the big old one. When I say "big old one" - I'm not exaggerating.

I love this machine. Absolutely love it. I love all 36 pounds of solid metal that runs so smoothly and quietly, compared to the roughness of the 14 pound plastic one. A friend gave it to me years ago, and it's gotten many, many hours of use from me.

It's old. But it worked great - for about an hour. And then it froze. And it's dead. It did this to me once before and it eventually came back to life, but I don't know if that's going to happen this time or not. I think I'm finally going to just have to bite the bullet and take both of them in to get them serviced - as soon as I find someone who will do it and not charge an arm and a leg for it.

So now I'm stuck with no machine to use - but thanks to a plea on facebook, a friend is going to loan me her machine. I'm going to take off as soon as I get the boys to school in the morning and head to Wichita to get it from her and hopefully, it will work *crossing fingers*. I'm running out of time to get this thing done!

On top of that, the ceiling light in my laundry room decided to quit working today. No, it's not just burned out - something's up with the socket. So I have to call the landlord and see if I can get him out here to fix it, because of course, that's the only light source in that room.

However, in an effort to not be completely and totally negative tonight....

I did manage to get out and walk about 4.5 miles today. Just walking, not at speed or anything, but I got out there and did it. Now, if I can just keep that up....

On one of my walks, I went to get the boys from school. We were walking back with a little girl who is Alex's age (and her mother and little brother) and as we were crossing the bridge over the local (dried up) creek, something caught my eye. I looked down into the puddle that used to be the creek (seriously, it's about 3" deep at most) and sure enough, there was a critter down there. We all stopped and watched him moving around for a few minutes, and then walked down off of the bridge and to the water's edge to see if we could see him closer, but he had disappeared. He was a good sized one too - probably about 6" long.

Have I mentioned lately how much I love this camera? I took that picture from the bridge above the water. I'm not sure how tall it is, but that crawdad was probably about 20-25' away from us and I still managed to get that picture of it.

So....it definitely wasn't the most stellar day ever - but there have been worse.