Travel, Maps and Quilt Dogs

It was not so much quilting busyness as work busyness I'm sorry to say. But it was interesting work busyness, as opposed to boring work busyness, which is good. I got to do my first work trip out to the middle of Western Australia and the 'city' (I use the term loosely) of Kalgoorlie-Boulder, 2586km/1606miles away - closest city east of Perth.  Unfortunately, it was too busy to take picture, so I have pinched them from the web (but being a good girl there should be hyperlinks to show where I got them from).

Main st in rain

On Thursday, between 4am and 5:30am I managed to hop out of bed, hop into a taxi, check in at the airport, fight through the crowds of miners (mining is big in the WA economy and most work on a Fly In Fly Out [FIFO] roster rather than living permanently out in the wilds of WA), go through security to the wrong terminal, clear security a second time to get into the right terminal and get on the plane for the 45 minute flight to Kal. (By the way, the number of men flying out to mines is incredible. No wonder you can't meet any in Perth. If anyone wants to set up speed dating in the departure lounge, it would be a good way to kill time and would be a surefire winner. The idea is mine though so I should get a cut of the profits).

Superpit

Centre of town

By 7:30, we'd landed, grabbed our bags and picked up the hire car for the short drive into the centre of Kal. We grabbed some breakfast and a decent coffee and headed out to a school. Left the school just after 1, tried and failed to find a decent place for lunch and ended up with a jaffle pie instead. Short and unsuccessful attempt to find the lookout to the Superpit before we sat down to write our report. Finished that at 4:45 which made it a LOOONGGG workday. Enormous pub dinner (steak and chips, burnt one end, raw the other), early night, school again next day at 9, run to airport for 2pm flight home and that was the end of my exciting work week.
I spent most of the weekend recovering, catching up with friends and a little, but not much, quilting.
Notice the neat segue to quilting?
A little while ago, our big mega craft store had 40% off all fabric and there was a set I could not resist. Ok, I should have been finishing off other projects not adding more to my WIP pile (I am determined to do a WIP Walk of Shame post listing all the projects on the go that I MUST FINISH!!!). Anyway, this set had a world map (which is going to be a puffy floor play mat - will Etsy it), a globe which is to be a birthday present for a friend's baby, and a soft book - just because... Of course, Patches IMMEDIATELY laid on it when I put it down and Lainey took 'GET OFF PATCHES' to mean 'come and sit on it too please Lainey', so I gave up.

My excuse for being lax on discipline was that I was feeling guilty as Patches thought he was going for a walk when I got home and found himself at the vet as he's been coughing and coughing and choking on his food. Magic of IPhone enabled me to show the vet as he refused to cough on demand. Little does he know that he's going back tomorrow for an Xray. He is not going to be happy. :(