sewing, sewing, sewing

my halloween quilt is coming along.  i have had to fussy cut a lot of the fabric.  look at those spinsters knitting, i wonder what they are talking about...

**examine your measuring standards


internal measuring standards -- idiosyncratic to you -- allow you to assess others' behaviour, opinions, values and ideas.  however, your standards probably do not measure what is real at all -- they reflect only what you know, what you've experienced, what you're comfortable with.  when others don't fit your measurements, as perceived through your unique and imperfect lenses, you may find that you label and judge them as inadequate, bad, sick, or sinful.  in fact, you can impair your own judgments by assuming you know why someone behaves in a certain way.  this is where you need to pause, stop making assumptions, and ask.  the explanation might surprise you.  consider dan p. graylings account of a woman who was surprised by the explanation for one young man's seemingly arrogant behaviour as he sat across from her at an airport restaurant table.  


the woman, who had just purchased a sack of cookies at the airport, sat reading a newspaper and eating her cookies while waiting for her flight.  she became aware of something rustling at her table and looked up to see a neatly dressed young man helping himself to her cookies.  reluctant to make a scene, she leaned over and took a cookie herself.  the young man in turn took another cookie, until the two had shared all but one cookie.  by this time, the woman was fuming.  then the young man took the last cookie, broke it in two, pushed half across to the woman, ate the other half, and left.  later, still angry with the young man, the woman opened her purse to retrieve her boarding ticket and was confronted by her own bag of cookies.  she had been eating his.  


negative judgments can be dangerous.  most often, they say more about our own deficiencies than those of others.  and sometimes we can get into big trouble {complicating our stress} when our judgments come back to haunt us and we have to listen to someone repeat word for word what we shouldn't have said.  it appears, as someone once astutely offered, "nothing is opened by mistake more than the mouth."