Ron’s gone back to NYC today to do some rope descents into a large void they have discovered. He expects to be gone 5 days. Here’s a few photos from his last trip down there, since the original posting has gone into archive at this point.

tonight when I got home, I worked awhile on the piecing for my 911 quilt:

Tonight my guild, East Side Quilters had our annual open house. We advertise the meeting and serve light refreshments and welcome visitors. The main activities though are two-fold. We present our “charity quilts” to the organizations that we’re giving them to. Tonight we gave about a dozen quilts each to Unity House and Davids House in Troy. Both serve displaced people, homeless people, victims of violence etc. Davids House is really a place for displaced families. We give our quilts and could probably give that many each month and not fill the need.

The other thing we do is have the results of our yearly challenge. This year’s challenge was to make something that involved a ninepatch block. And to tie it somehow to a famous line, bit of poem, title, song verse etc. We had lots of entries this year, from very traditional to not. I won second place in the unfinished category for my amish nine patch. My theme was “Order from Chaos.”

There were several small quilts made in response to last week’s terrorist acts. One woman could barely describe her quilt and her reason for making it.

Quite a contrast from my day today. Day two of training. I keep wondering – doesn’t your face hurt from all that smiling? I don’t know what to make of it, but it ain’t good. And yet it seems pretty trivial in the grand scheme of things. And as I keep reminding myself – I need a job, I need a job.