A Master of Embroidery

One the reasons, I started this site was to celebrate excellence in workmanship.  I recently stumbled across a blog by Mary Corbet while looking for information on cloth of gold. She is a master of embroidery. She creates by hand ecclesiastical embroidery that is simply exquisite.

She has posted an example piece in six entries,  the first image shows the layout of the planned piece.  It is a great photo to give you an idea of the size of the work.

You can really see the details of the needlework in the next two images:

 

Close-up of the above image:

The detail work, the color blending is just amazing.  Just look at the finished piece.  From the side photo, you can see the gold thread work.

A detail of the finished piece.

Now here is the really amazing  part - it took her six weeks to create this masterpiece (380 hours).  This is a lot of time but I have taken a month just to paint a room.  It is really hard to imagine being that gifted at embroidery. Or that focused on a goal.

Think of it another way; if she had worked just two hours a day, in little over six months this is what  she would have to show for it.

My husband is always talking about how important it is to find what you are good at and to focus your efforts in that direction.  This is a great example of someone putting their time, talents and efforts to create something that is really amazing. Everyone has a talent but we are not all focused on making the best use of that talent.

So how are you going to spend that two hours a day? Time to get busy and create a masterpiece (or at least finish painting the living room).
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In case you are interested,  the entire project is shown in steps on Needle'n Thread.com

There is also a set of  photos of some incredible goldwork (gold thread) at the the same site.  Don't miss it, this work is unbelievable it is so perfect.

Organize your E-Mail

I recently spoke a conference on ways to increase your productivity on your computer. Although I touched on several topics, several people have contacted me regarding the section on organizing e-mail and computer files. For that reason, I am posting a heavily edited version of that presentation on this site. I needed to remove the screen shots in the presentation due to copyright concerns but I believe that the directions are still understandable.

 MECA 2010 Edited Version


If you have any questions about this please contact me. Please do not republish this information but you may link to this post.

Hope you find this useful.

Snow in Mississippi??? How silly!!

I did not think it was possible but we had a snow day last week in Mississippi. Snow was even expected on the coast but we missed it. I understand that it did snow for about five minutes but I must have blinked and missed it. Four inches fell about an hour and half north of Ocean Springs in Hattiesburg and it did get cold enough that all the palm trees are now brown. I really felt sorry for all the school kids, everyone was expecting one to two inches. I was also hoping to photograph snow on the beach. (Now that really would be a photo; a whole new meaning to snow white beaches. )

If you want to see what a Mississippi snow looked like the Hattiesburg American posted some local photos.

I am sorry we missed it! It would have been grand!

Professionalism and Sudden Acceleration

Last week, it was determined that the problem with our car was not fixable. Since this was a new car, we were able to trade it in at a good price on a replacement. The cause of the problem was never determined.

The mystery problem was that the car would race unexpectedly even when the car was in neutral and there was no application of the gas pedal. Applying the brakes was not effective and the car would continue to fight the brakes and try to accelerate. This happened suddenly and repeatedly the last time we drove the car. We immediately took the car to the dealer and fortunately for us, it repeated this pattern in the service bay for the service manager. It was agreed that the fault was a dangerous one but it was not possible to replicate the fault consistently. For this reason, determining the cause was not likely. The best we could hope for was an educated guess and hope that the guess was on target. Since the last drive in that car had been one of the most harrowing experiences of our lives, we decided to trade in the car. The car is to be returned to Honda for review by the engineering staff (we hope that this is the case).

What impressed us most about this experience was how hard the Honda dealer worked to solve this problem. The problem was taken seriously; it was never implied that this was a floor mat problem or a confused driver problem. I realize that we had the advantage that the service manager had witnessed the problem but even so the temptation must have been great to replace a part and declare it fixed even though the problem has not be identified. In the final discussion, the service manager explained his best guess about the cause (possible electronic throttle issues) and told us that there was no way to know if this fixed the car. We would have to drive the car and if the problem did not reoccur then perhaps it was fixed. This uncertainly was not comfortable for us so after discussing all of our options, we decided to replace the car.

The professionalism in presenting the situation was memorable. Sometimes the real answer to a question is that the answer is not known. In many cases, this is the best answer. Knowing the real situation allowed us to make the decision that we could live with.

We decided to trade the car for the same model in this current year. After reviewing the statistics, it appears that this problem crosses brands and we hope that we just had a bad car. Sudden acceleration and similar problems appear to have been reported in a wide variety of models so it did not seem possible to avoid this issue for certain by changing models. Since our wide ride, I started reading everything I could find on this problem. At this point, I really think that there is design fault in the electronic control systems. I am not sure that we made the right decision but we do believe that we made the best decision given the known information.

We were very lucky. No one was hurt by our car; our dealer was fair and the service manager was an outstanding professional. At the present time, I think this is the best you can hope for.

If you are interested in sudden acceleration, you might find the following links interesting.

Doubt cast on Toyota's decision to blame sudden acceleration on gas pedal defect

Analysis shows over 40 percent of sudden-acceleration complaints involve Toyotas

Sudden Acceleration: It's Bad, and It's Not Just Toyota