Tired and busy

I’m afraid I’ve been a bad blogger lately. As I’ve noticed that the days are getting quite shorter, I think the pre-winter blues have set in. There was even a forecast for snow today (although it hasn’t happened yet). And Shawn was diagnosed with pneumonia this week. Nothing says winter like sickness spreading through the Embassy community like wildfire.

And sleep has been in short supply here lately. Shawn’s hacking cough kept us both up at night for a good portion of the past week. And Laika’s…having issues, I guess you would say. We’ve altered the nighttime routine in hopes that will help her sleeping patterns — i.e. stop her from waking us up at some point between 1am and 5am every night. So she pretty much gets run of the house all night now (sorry, Peema…), and it seems to be working so far. She’s been coming into the bedroom to get one of us up at 6am to lay on the couch with her, but we’ve declared that we can both live with that.

I’ve been really busy for the past few weeks. After two muslins (the pattern was old and needed a lot of work to fit like I wanted it to), I’m almost finished with my ball gown. And now I’ve added two Halloween costumes to the pile of projects in my sewing space. Finding Halloween costumes in Ukraine has turned out to be a difficult task. You know how in the States, you would just run to the nearest Goodwill, Dollar Store, or Target, and pick out cheap things that you could make into something? It doesn’t work that way here. You have to buy real things – with real (over)prices – and work with that. Or start from scratch. Right now I’m working with $30 worth of fabric that will soon be a costume for me. Today we went to a local mall, and $40 later, we’ve got the beginnings of a costume for Shawn. It still needs quite a bit of work and there will be another trip to the fabric store, but we’re on track to actually have costumes by the 31st.

In interesting neighborhood news: When we came back from shopping today, we noticed that they are building a wall down the middle of the street behind our apartment building. Which should do wonderful things to the already terrible traffic. A little further on, we found that they are building another wall blocking the back alleyway we often use as a shortcut to get home. I’m starting to get a little worried that we’ll wake up one day to find that we’ve been completely walled into our building. That might just be the last straw.