Caution:Hypochondriac quilting

I remember back when I was 18 years old, freshly married, and working in D.C., I used to devour every woman's magazine I could get my hands on during the hour-plus commute. One story that stays with me was the story of a healthy young 20-something woman who just dropped dead without warning. She had a headache and took some aspirin. Turns out what she really had was an undiagnosed brain tumor. For months after reading that article, every headache I had sent me into frantic worrying that I too had an undiagnosed brain tumor and would surely keel over on a downtown street, or in the back of the chartered bus on a Friday afternoon not to be found until Monday morning's commute..

Remember how I mentioned that Buster broke the Tiffany lamp as well as one of the CFL bulbs in it? Well, for the past few days I've had a neck ache, the kind that could happen if you thought you drove past Johnny Depp on the Beltway and you whipped your head around real quick to check and see if it really was him (but it wasn't). At any rate, no amount of naproxen has helped.

And you know how sometimes your toes hurt if you're wearing new thong-type flip flops that are just a little wider or rougher or stiffer on the part that goes between your toes? Well, my toes have hurt for a couple of days, only I haven't worn flip flops for five days. (dum dum dum dum).

Are you with me? The plot thickens....

A couple days ago I noticed the hanging plants in the kitchen window have been looking pretty 'not green'. Obviously in need of some kind of fertilizer, I've been plucking leaves off them with an increasing regularity. Looking at them tonight, I'm starting to wonder if our water doesn't contain some deadly chemical that is slowly killing us, and the plants are trying to tell me something....or maybe they're choking on mercury vapors wafting through the kitchen.

Could all of this be because I didn't run through the house and open all the windows and turn on the a/c and fans when that lamp hit the floor? And I actually picked up all the glass shards with my bare hands, sustaining a minor cut (where mercury undoubtedly leeched into my bloodstream), and I'm pretty sure I might have put my finger in my mouth when I cut it. And. I didn't  double bag the glass shards it and deliver it to the EPA, I just dropped it in the kitchen trash can where it probably sat for a day, oozing noxious, plant-killing vapors.

I'd like to think it's just my over-active imagination. The constant neck pain is some combination of my old overstuffed pillow on the new firm mattress...the rapidly dying plants might not have liked the tiny bit of acid-loving fertilizer they got over the weekend...I'm searching for some rational explanation. But then, there's a dark side that has me thinking that I could be a feature story in LHJ, and a year from now, some naive little twenty-something will start to wonder about her own neck ache.......or maybe I'll wake up in the morning to find I've grown an extra toe on each foot.

Other than that, productive last couple of days. Got the house totally cleaned as soon as the grandpup was picked up. Down to two dogs, back to normal. Managed to remember to go water my friend Anna's plants (she's at the beach). Went to my first class of 5 I've scheduled for this week, and I'm a third of the way through the homework for next week.

Pretty amazing that this:

turns into this:

The finished quilt is called Windmill Farm. The wide strips in each set cut at 7-1/8". I hope I never have to use 1/8" again. I'm going scrappy with Moda's Pumpkins Gone Wild from a couple years ago (O-M-G....she's using something from her stash!) The background is Kaufmann Kona Cotton. I'm thinkng about using a dark colored thread to quilt it....sort of like painting on a clean canvas.

Of course, all bets are off if I really do have Toxic CFL Syndrome.  If you don't hear from me for a week, call the EPA.

Non-toxic Tuesday wishes to all of you!