Heading to the middle of the world...

It has been nearly a week since I posted on this blog. It has been a busy one. On Saturday I drove to the The Dalles, Oregon to talk to the Columbia Gorge Quilt Guild about the Twelve by Twelve project. It was a rainy, gray drive through the Gorge, but even in such weather it is still one of my favorite drives.

The quilt guild was lovely—warm and welcoming—and I managed to embarrass myself by allowing the battery in my laptop to deplete while I was waiting to talk, so when I started my talk, a couple slides in, it conked out and I could not show the planned slide show. Fortunately I had brought copies of the book and my Twelve by Twelve quilts so I just talked and showed the quilts. Thanks, probably to that terror-induced adrenaline rush, I found myself telling stories and even making the audience laugh. I think it was OK in the end, but geez, how dumb was that?

We are leaving this Saturday for three weeks in Ecuador. We will be standing on the equator, as we were doing in the photo above, taken 10 years ago, while visiting our daughter who was living in Ecuador at that time. That's my sister-in-law, Jamie; me, daughter, Emily; brother-in-law, Roy; Ray; and son, Andy. The yellow line we are straddling is where the equator runs. We each have one foot in the southern hemisphere and one foot in the northern hemisphere. Behind us is the monument and museum called "Mitad del Mundo," or the "Middle of the World."

This trip is mainly for our son Andy to finish the dental work he went to Ecuador in June to start. I wrote about it here. He will get his permanent dental implants on this trip and Ray and I decided to go with him. We will try to plan some side trips and times to visit with our son-in-law's family while there, but I am also looking forward to relaxing, eating some good Ecuadorean food, drawing, revisiting some of our favorite places and doing my Christmas shopping in the indigenous markets while there! I will try to blog, but it remains to be seen how difficult or easy that may be. So, if I seem to be missing, I am!

Back to laundry, ironing and packing...